posted 01-17-2001 03:03 AM               

Damn, was I missing out.

A couple weeks ago I got a hold of Say You Want a Revolution, the first Invisibles collection. I've already read it twice, and I'm sure I'll reread it soon. This is one of the most truly creative pieces of writing I've ever seen. Grant Morrison is trying to pack so many ideas in here that he has to fight not to get carried away. He often loses (or maybe he lets himself lose) and that's part of the fun - the exhilarating rush from one idea to the next and then back again, the sense of never quite being sure when the rug's going to get pulled out from under you. There's almost a palpable sense of your brain going places it's never gone before.

All right. You want a plot synopsis. Here goes. There's a battle going on in human society between forces of order and forces of liberation. The latter are the Invisibles - a secret society stretching back centuries that includes Percy Shelly and George Byron among its members. A juvenile delinquent is recruited into an Invisibles cell, whose members then use magic to project their psyches back in time to revolution-era France and ask the Marquis de Sade if he wouldn't mind popping back with them to the twentieth century. There's more, but you're going to have to read the book.

The plots themselves are inventive, but where the book shines is in its structure - the narrative unfolds in a very dreamlike way, with liberal use of non sequiturs, quick scene transitions, literary excerpts and allusions (Byron and Shelley are characters, after all), and often-rambling dialogue. Things often seem a bit off-kilter, but the absurd never becomes total nonsense. The use of magic here is worth noting - it's more than your typical hocus-pocus stuff. Morrison considers himself a magician, and his scripts are parts of his spells; like the Invisibles, he's trying to remake the world with power of his thoughts and words. It's powerful stuff, suggesting we push ourselves up against the boundaries we set for ourselves and those that are set for us by society, to see why they were put there and if they're doing more harm than good. The Invisibles is about seizing your destiny, and Say You Want a Revolution is the opening salvo in a war of liberation.

The message of liberation often takes a dark tone, and I'm pretty sure I don't share a moral sensibility with most of these characters. But if you're ever wondering what people are talking about when they say sometimes depictions of violence or drug use or S & M (the Marquis de Sade is a character, after all) are needed to tell a story, here's an example. These things aren't glorified, but neither are they condemned. (The cruelty that often accompanies repression in all its forms is condemned, as befits the theme of the book.) Steve Yeowell (who draws the "Dead Beetles" and "Down and Out in Heaven and Hell" arcs) and the team of Jill Thompson and Dennis Cramer (who handle "Arcadia") don't pull punches with their depiction of Morrison's scripts, but neither do they wallow in lurid detail. The art itself is more conventional than the script - competent, but never spectacular. The colors are almost subdued, the panel layouts and "camera" angles are fairly traditional, and the character designs are for the most part, although not always, relatively simple. In short, the art tells the story well -and it's a story well-served by being seen - but it's the words of the story that have the most impact.

Suffice to say, I'm eager to see where the rest of this story goes. Unfortunately, even though The Invisibles concluded over a year ago, DC hasn't finished putting out all the collected editions, and the ones it has released it released out of order. So even though this book ends on something of a slight cliffhanger, the very next volume in the series won't be out until April.

Oh well. I've waited since 1994. What's another few months?