Patricia Highsmash
There Is Nothing Left to Say On The Invisibles
The Invisible Arts
by Travis Hedge Coke
We live in mood museums if I say so.
EXCOÖRDISM
King Mob has a tattoo so someone else may not have to. A whirl of eternal rest and eternal recreation.
Jill Thompson deliberately gave Ragged Robin a nose to move her away from a common type of body and face. Phil Jimenez deliberately portrayed Lord Fanny’s nose to give her a touch of ethnically-appropriate features which would perhaps go unaddressed, or unawares, by those not of Latin descent.
Neither a paranoid nor reparative reader but an ergodic responder and co-plotter. Sentimental Nonsense, surreal realism, needs players.
YH is like a breath in. WH; breath out. The basic melody.
The Invisibles is lettered by Todd Klein, Clem Robins, Ellie DeVille, and others. Inked by John Stokes, Philip Bond, Arnold Pander, Justine Mara Andersen, Paul Johnson. The credited writer is originator, Grant Morrison, but they credit a load of other people with contributions to those ends. The pencilers include Chris Weston, Frank Quitely, Phil Jimenez, and many of the aforementioned, from Morrison and Thompson to Bond.
If ergot and ergodic have a root in common, it is in the grund. To bond we have to get closer and the closer you get, the more wet the paint on every surface. .excoördisM
Trouble of unpaid labor is that art is an unpaid labor but so is sleep, dinner, din, and our mistakes. I learn from my mistakes as much as anybody, but this is not much and we run a deficit.
Most of the work put into The Invisibles, we will never know all at once enough to appreciate. Our brains practice a temperance our souls might retract from. Maybe our souls are in on it, too.
Ima invoke Binah, the sphere of understanding. Creating those lower jugs a filling up in the pale moonlight. Blood in, mother, too. We invoke physical labor.
In the Pokémon circuit studies, Basculin’s immense entry to a million of cores-constituted refers forms as is in the base masculine economy in White Version, outside the made series’ alternate circuit. Pokémon Youth for Striped to White on, however, describes regional nuclear piraña of acquired political operatives, surpassing Pokémon, and Isidore Isou is Marx the A. Isidore Isou deduced the number from Pokémon of most of the first, this of regional game of internal makes, more for pleasure. Angles lose fire as they mix up video games with lived expressions.
The emotional work of audiences, the physical labor artists, and the emotional labor of artists, the physical put in by audiences. Some comics will sweat you out under the lights and you confess all kind of things you did not know.
One thing we all sit for, is The Invisibles, doing it now or later or six years ago.
A day for four-motion. The transition of unbodied real, of nothing quality, of nothing state, and a fourth unspeciated thing. Angles lose fire as they mix up in ages and incarnations. Sparks and flames of born light as we are borne. “The tither was a ploughman’s collie, a rhyming, ranting, raving billie,” who, “stroan’t on stanes an’ hillocks wi’ him.”
The Invisibles consults Beatles, but Beatles made in ink or light. Beetles mocked in stone or song. Acid and metaphor witty and whittling through.
Nonsense and other genres, built of blocks whether known or knot, eek out players. Seek out plaer (an old Catalan word of Neo-Latin descent). With The Invisibles, they were playing when making, and we play and make it. The holy city and the invisible college are two wit wombs. God’s home cairn pillar shapeless stone robot likeness. “Phallic,” they say, of mottled triangles and perfect spheres. Bethel. Baetyl. Bethel. Batylos. Meteorite. Meteorite. Alright. Alright. That’s right. Sing the Skeletones.
Hermaphrodite Prometheus. They same, some, that everyone used to be without sex, sometime ago, but between then and now, of multiple genders. If I queer anyone in The Invisibles or in There is Nothing Left to Say, I am guilty of queering none. Matters of state and quality. The paste up stars and the paste in kachina and the blur or the recoloring on pages we may notice but might not never know why.
Self-edits are edits. Cuts by others; cut. Cutting genders. All the edits to sexual content, violent or friendly. We can never agree on shape or content of the Grail or a. Universes b and a and a wall between.
Are “lost souls” better than “assaulted children”? Are all the drafts of Mob and Robin closer and closer on the face in sex a staccato zoom in as Chris Weston drew them, or as they were pictured or thumbnailed, scripted, planned and replanned?
Every draft a mystagogy. Any glance, any recollection its own draft. Cannot think on a thing without cracking the window and letting in a breeze of inspiration.
Are we looking on “los souls” and seeing children? On children and seeing spirit? On mirror and seeing opposition? Stones and erections and vaginas and shapeless stone robot likeness? Teacher or Woman, Anubis or Battle?
Basculin is a trademark of Nintendo. The Invisibles had been a comic for over a year before the first Pokémon game was released. Nintendo was founded in 1889 to manufacture card games. Whether hanafuda cards were traditionally used for divination, or only in the past decades is argued and immaterial.
A spread of cards is a stack of panels. If The Invisibles is pornographic, maybe it is because we are making it on the pages.
It is hard to be sure of anything. Often, I love a character because their flaws rise out to me. Somebody fictive grates on me because of their handling.
Many a culture has old stories or spin new that by turns old souls reduce their godliness or fire by burning it off in resurrections. Monads and triangulations in eternal motion through lower realms of materiality, the hip swivel and knee locking spheres of now and here.
There is Nothing Left to Say is idiosyncratic & subjective. I think, while anthropomorphism has risks, it’s best to think of gods, spirits, demons, animals, plants, locations, et al, as, “people,” especially in fiction, wherein they are characters. So, the book steers this way.
What did Jacob say when he tried to nap his head on God’s own home?
“See you, ladder.”
Struggle is manifested, like the panelization of life in the gekiga time which absorbs, involves, and permeates the perhaps-more-comfortable cinematic time which is more traditionally present in anglophone comics. If timespace is how time and space are related in portrayal
“First, as the means by which a text represents history; second, as the relation between images of time and space in the novel, out of which any representation of history must be constructed; and third, as a way of discussing the formal properties of the text itself.”
– Vice
There is a disjunction. An interrupt in the an eruption of grammatical misconduct, which itself is parcel part of systemization.
“Many comics that represent conflict include ‘actual’ information in the artwork, where photographs of the event are spliced into the piece in an attempt to lend an air of accuracy and historical credibility. For the most part, it is assumed that what the camera shows us is unvarnished truth.”
– Earle, who quotes Vice, creating a comic of words and lacunae and grammar, if I may say so, irreflexive of photo or xerography collage in The Invisibles, anti-reflexive wherein The Invisibles removes, forgets, reforgets or replaces paste up. The postcard collage can illustrate realness or artifact. The mimicked handwriting by a visual artist (the penciler) erased by the mimetic handwriting of a visual artist erased (the letterer).
We learn as much through austerity and excess. We lean into either, and tip away. A comic with its color removed can help us follow the lines and lacunae, while the color guides can make clear actual application instead of appearance. Pencils, or scans of pencils, can reveal things obscured by ink, by color, by reproduction. Different reproductions show differences in reproduction.
The Invisibles can be a model of a unification of cultures and thoughts, but a model only models. Condensing a whirl of religions and cultures to a monoklatch ignores the story of babble around the office coffeepot or the kettle in your kitchen. The condensation can stain a map; make model.
We find in the pornography the magnum opus, the conjuration.
But, honestly, what do I really know of their flaws or handling? You ought to take things with some humility, but nobody will tell you how much in a way you can trust.
Some of us get good and plenty and others have licorice.
*******
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.
Call it a Day. 1935.
The Prisoner. 1967.
Love Nest. 1951.
Thomasina, the Cat Who Thought She Was God. 1957.
The Starlight Barking. 1967.