Patricia Highsmash
Us Living in Fictional Cosmogonies
Part XII: Writing The Invisibles
by Travis Hedge Coke
They are called catchphrases because they are viral.
“With The Street Fighter the violence is the entertainment. In Taxi Driver, it is there to make a very important character statement about Travis Bickle.”
When Steve Gerber, brilliant writer, beloved man said this, in an interview with The Comics Journal, when he attacked martial arts movies in a Howard the Duck comic, Gerber was looking at the two movies, and specifically at The Street Fighter via the gaze he had available to him. I imagine him feeling little reason to question it.
Directed by Ozawa Shigero who would return to themes of racism and racial injustice in later sequels, The Street Fighter is about a mixed-race man incredibly frustrated at his nation’s racism, at the racism that destroyed his childhood, his family, that kills people. The title street fighter, played by Sonny Chiba – genius, beloved man, actor, union organizer who faced racist aspersions himself, for his hair and looks – does not simply fuck guys up, as another white writer would have a character-as-mouth say in True Romance. The woman whose kidnapping drives much of the plot is also mixed race. Chiba’s Tsurugi fucks up a lot of guys, but primarily, specifically, elitist organized crime, rapists and racists.
The Street Fighter is not simply about violence for the display of violence. It is centrally about the bigoted sins of Japan and tearing their eyes out on a rainy dock because fuck them. It is every bit as about something as Taxi Driver, and may even be more savvy as to what it is about than Taxi Driver, with its chess games and card bluffs to avoid racism and misogyny thicker in the script.
But, Gerber, whose Duck would decry the lack of peaceful nonviolent philosophy in a fucking up racists movie, saw something more in Travis Bickle and the movie around him. Something worthy. Worth talking about. He saw a white man, and I could stop there, and assume that was the end of it, but is it? Or, is that the part I latch onto looking at Gerber looking at two movies?
The Invisibles, in many way, stands on the shoulders of Steve Gerber. The Invisibles stands on a lot of shoulders, a comic about influences, a comic about influencing, interpreting, misperceiving, willfully reconstructing.
The Invisibles knows that one perspective is not enough, that there is no one perspective. “So we return and begin again,” it opens, taking us to ontic zones, to universe a and universe b, to the page, under the page, to the writing of the page, to the effects of the page.
Halfway into The Invisibles, traveling lineally page after bound page, by sequentially released issues, we learn that the comic we are reading, which we have actually seen exist in issues of the comic, that this world, this existence, is fan fiction crafted by the character Ragged Robin, in the early Twenty-First Century, using sensory deprivation tanks, drugs, whatever it takes to get deep into the story, move around and change things. “Writing pornography in the notebooks of the gods.”
We tend to forget this as soon as we learn it. As quickly as we learn it.
And, that may be good, because it is darkly hilarious, or funnily horrendous, to watch Robin walk through scenes while we know it. Blowing off characters’ intense suffering, chiding people she is writing, having sex with two separate Batman fanboys while calling herself Robin and the pocket of her childhood coveralls changing between panels to the shape of the Superman shield. Robin is young, frustrated, excited, experimental, brilliant, horny and tired and she rewrote the narrative, the lives of, and the reality of The Invisibles.
Robin spends the entire comic saving the life of a woman who, in-story, she supposedly dislikes. Because she likes her. She might stop her from being killed by gunfire in New Mexico, and a little over a dozen issues later, again in London.
Does in-story fictive Robin know what in-story writer of fictive Robin knows? Does, inside the story so deep, she also forget to remember?
You have to forget to remember.
Some tricks stop working when you learn what makes them work and you cannot stop focusing on the part invisible to everyone else.
There are some illusions which, even if you know precisely the illusion’s mechanics, the spell is not broken.
The racial and ethnic politics of Lord Fanny as representation in The Invisibles, their representativeness as the most loudly clear of the main cast. I love Fanny, but she’s pan-Latin America, Brazilian-Mexican, she’s nonbinary and sometimes seems to shift to binaries, he has aspects that are described as crossdressing, as female or male gendered, as ritual adoptions of guises, all treated as equally valid, and their name in the Invisibles comes from Captain John Augustus Hervey, Lord Hervey, a British diplomat who worked with the governments of Portugal and its colony of Brazil.
Is the character of Fanny limited by being too much, spread too thin, or is being spread too thin part of her character? Is being never only one thing her character? What part is written by Morrison, drawn by a cadre of co-authors, colored and miscolored by the series’ dedicated colorist, and what is brought in or anticipated by me? How much do I miswrite Fanny in reading or rumination?
Knowing is not seeing, seeing is not understanding, understanding is no protection from feeling, feelings are not conviction. After all, the comic we read is the fanfic of Robin but the fic written by Robin is not a comic. The comic inside the comic is both the comic it is inside and it cannot be.
A recurring subplot of The Invisibles is heavy on allusions to the fiction of Philip K Dick, and other times characters quote or paraphrase the author, works that the writer of The Invisibles, Grant Morrison, had not yet read, or at least, read much of. There is nothing but nerves to stop you from writing about, or drawing about, singing about, painting about, talking about works of art you are not closely familiar with. Morrison knew the marks and demarcations of Dick’s work, the broad strokes and the specific gestures, because they are part of many other conversations, many other narratives, throughout science fiction and conspiracy.
We know about things without having experienced them in full or in detail. “Luke, I am your father,” is more real and active in our mind than the actual quote from the actual movie. We all remember Spielberg, or at least some 1980s Amblin movies taking place in small Middle America towns where the white kids are middling americaning. What movie? None that can be pointed to. It is in our heads. If the world soul has movies, maybe there. Which shows what we do to the world soul.
The Invisibles, itself, is so large and complicated, with built-in conflations, echoes, and reversals aplenty, that it becomes difficult to be sure of memory of a scene or that a scene, revisited, is exactly what it seems to be, or if we have forgotten the reveal or detail which later or earlier would alter it.
Collections would change the backgrounds, sometimes non-diegetic backgrounds, such as abstract patterns, sometimes diegetic, including stars in the sky. Sometimes art was redrawn, most infamously whole pages towards the end of the comic, when a passage meant to be as clear and easily parsed as possible were rendered even more metaphorically and symbolically than the already kind of abstracted script they were drawing from. The omnibus edition, which collects the comic, backmatter essays and suggestions, pitch documents, preliminary art designs, and more, fails to include the snarky and thematically relevant paper dolls drawn by prominent co-author and penciler, Phil Jimenez.
Jimenez is co-author. The Invisibles, while copyright and trademarks are ascribed to Grant Morrison, has many co-authors, from those who worked directly making the various comics that make up the comic, to the influences and those whose work is lifted sometimes in substantial or whole part, by voices recorded on field recordings and fanon that impressed Morrison, and editorial requirements, and the advertising content in the various printings and editions, and the audience’s conversations, and the analysis and annotation books and what those books misinterpreted, avoided, emphasized. The Invisibles is the work of a colorist, of pencilers, inkers, editors, letterers, of Morrison’s friends and colleagues, of old poets who died young and young writers who had become old and plays adapting novels and heads quoting short stories and television program set designers and comics writers from when Grant Morrison was breaking into comics.
I am not seeking to, I have no interest in discrediting Grant Morrison as the author of The Invisibles, but The Invisibles is big because it ebbs and flows from gravity, from tributaries, from sources and pumps. The Invisibles more than influenced the Matrix franchise, recent conspiracy theories, Marvel’s poorly-considered The Brotherhood, and continues to give as well as borrow or reutilize. Like life. Like the world soul we have yet not established. Even the comic, The Secret Defenders, appears to mirror the earliest issues of The Invisibles, at the same time which those earliest issues were being published.
![](https://comic-watch.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/UsLiving1213-scaled.jpg)
Which is Cody? Which is Dane? Which is Cadaver? Which is Jack?
Is Cody Fleischer of The Secret Defenders, this disaffected teen with graveyard powers and tall white avatar, the Guardian of the Moebius Stone, the Pale Horseman, a lookalike in all ways, for Jack Frost, born Dane McGowan, a golden child, a child of the new aeon, a buddha from Liverpool who jacks cars and swears, or are they more than mirror images? Are they less?
The Invisibles is not only read, but played. Play The Invisibles enough, you are always playing The Invisibles. It is that game. (Not that one, but that one.)
Cadaver, Fleischer, pulls a rib from his body and makes with it a sword covered in blue flame. Jack Frost spits out the mirror in his heart, beside the stone soul in his breast or of it, to heal a man’s lingually-induced lethal illness.
They debut months apart from different publishers.
One of the most famed accusations of plagiarism, regarding The Invisibles, turns out not to be as word for word as the accuser believed.
Our limitations are as real as most.
“The end of our foundation is the knowledge of causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible.”
– The New Atlantis, Sir Francis Bacon
To look for a guidebook to The Invisibles, one is probably better served with old episodes of the Batman television show, or Barbarella promotional photos, or Francis Bacon, or Richard Gerber’s Utopian Fantasy, than any of the nominal guides. Even the very smart and articulate ones. One early guidebook specifically for The Invisibles tells you about Twinkies and whether a character possesses a “human ass” or a round one, but fails to give much in the way of literary or artistic antecedents, philosophies, political movements. They are all, by necessity, limited. My earlier essays and listicles about The Invisibles are as, if not more limited. The pages and panels of The Invisibles are too limited to cover The Invisibles.
The Invisibles is not the page and panel text. The Invisibles is every invited rumination, meditation, and conversation, medicant and mendicant. The influences on The Invisibles are not solely the influences on the central author, the co-authoring artists, letterers, et al, but the influences on us who have read it, who have played it, who have only heard or read about it.
Ragged Robin is author of and player in The Invisibles, and someone else writes a memoir called, The Invisibles, and there is this comic written by Grant Morrison, The Invisibles; a novel by Cecilia Galante from 2015; an 1810 etching called Les Invisibles by the comics-author & occultist James Gillroy; Zia Jaffrey’s travelogue on eunuchs in India; an a book-length “explanation of phenomena” by MJ Williamson first published in 1867 and concerning primarily things which must not be called spirit, spiritualism, intercourse betwixt, death, the dead, the living, the not dead, and goings on in places like South Bend, Ohio, in the United States.
The Invisibles, for you, is now already and will be influenced by all everything you will bring into it at any future date.
Grant Morrison called the comic and the game a spell to put Invisibles in touch with Invisibles and it does that because we are, too, texts with so many authors and co-authors and editors and annotators and bitter and loving online reviews. For every Invisible, a The Invisibles, and for every The Invisibles, many Invisibles, and for each Invisible, multitudinous The Invisibles. Not because it is perfect or because of a brilliance or infallibility, but because it is consistently fallible. The promises made early on, the secrets of the universe, so on, are either bluffs to keep us engaged or things the author(s) changed their mind about later.
The Invisibles cannot fulfill. Should not fulfill. Feel free to argue even the parts which are taken straight from what is called, at least, real life. The way Boy talks of her family and her younger life is sometimes silly, sometimes verges on racial insensitivity or fetishization. Boy engaging in a romantic, physical relationship with a white teenager from England leaves a poor taste in many mouths, including her own, apparently, as she jumps ship and then much of the rest of the narrative shortly after. An amazing character and inspiration, Lord Fanny has annoyed a variety of Indigenous people and trans folks since her introduction, her origins either made from too broad a stroke across multiple cultures and experiences or complicatingly complex in ways unexplored by the comic, her or his gender situation messy and flooded with affectation and earnestness. King Mob and others address the white supremacist history and alliances of some of the comics’ centered motifs, echoing the airbrushed-aryan of the 1980s, Max Headroom.
We have to separate characters from authors, even mouthpiece characters. By being character, being in-character, the mouthpiece comes into play with the other authored voices and an expected audience reaction. Any voice in The Invisibles can tell it right or tell it wrong, just as I cannot take the talking duck in Gerber’s Howard the Duck as specifically his full and total thoughts when he is angry at The Street Fighter and other martial arts movies, referring to a Black kid as an “ape,” an Asian kid as a “fortune cookie,” and complaining that a group of mixed-ethnicity children laughing are “a virus,” while arguing he, a talking duck from another world, knows more about “ancient philosophy” than contemporary Asian entertainment or some New York City kids laughing about a movie.
Sometimes, the most obvious mouthpiece is also the most obvious asshole.
Some of the most beloved characters inside The Invisibles and by fans, from Mob to Tom, Mason to Quimper are astonishingly horrific people. Tom O’Bedlam is affable goofy mentor, sad old homeless ghost, poor little rich man, and holy fucking terror. Edith Manning can verbally or socially own King Mob or the Marquis de Sade, but she is simultaneously a damning portrait of the worst of rich old orientalist white women. Quimper being fooled, kissed, and saved does not rectify nor erase the evil of his actions, the harm caused.
The Invisibles approaches its cosmogony with the principles that everyone is a stereotype, that everyone can be saved, that a person can put themselves into the lived experience of everyone else. Ambitious, optimistic, and perfect for generating disagreement as well as a religious agreement. It is religious. It is utopic. It is a farce and mockery and shell game and charlatanry, an echo and a facade and a fantasy and a forbearance, too, of the utopic.
We will never know if Fanny’s assault, in which she first met Quimper, is a real memory or a fake memory generated with her friend’s incest porn from the future. Real occurrence or not, physical event or not, the memory is a formative memory for Fanny and for Quimper and contributes to his rescue and Fanny’s strong sense of self.
Realness is not a prerequisite for affect.
The deadlines of the comic gave deadlines to arguments within the comic. The Invisibles ran shorter than conceived because the end of the Twentieth Century was set as a deadline for release of the final issues. It comes in around time. The comic establishes a world-altering, or at least, a perspective altering event in 2012, which it buffers by establishing it also happens in 1924. And, 1994. And, 1997. Often. Always.
2012 came and went and most of us are sure, as with most apocalyptic prophesy moments, that nothing much happened outside the ordinary. The world did not wobble more than it does every week. But, that may be the event. This may be the event.
We could be the event.
The revelatory moment in The Invisibles is a revelation for everyone and for each as one. For us. And, for us.
We play the event, midway through the comic, in the paratext that has been embedded in the text, a short comic of King Mob experiencing the event. At the end of the comic, we see it centered around the perspective of Jack Frost, a long way from Dane of Liverpool, but not much far from him. Their versions play – immersive with symbolism and provocative exciting narratives – to their personal proclivities. Might be that everyone’s do. We do not actually confirm any objective event. Any objective enlightenment or blessing.
How would you?
If time is a flat circle, this is a theater in the round. Quotes. Somebody’s conversations. It’s all catchphrases out here.