The Invisibles Vol. 3 #4: 'The Invisible Kingdom: Part 1: Planet Stepford'
We begin the troubled final arc with an issue that isn’t actually that troubled. I remember the first time I read the art jam issues I was furious, the inexplicable changes in style made no sense, and were particularly tough to take after the wonderful consistency of Jiminez and Weston in Volume II. Why were we subjected to this awful mashup of styles, mostly from artists who didn’t make much of an impact on the series in the first place? While I’ve come around a bit on the concept, mainly because I’ve just accepted it as what is, the art jam remains frustrating. I think a better approach would have been to give the three biggest artists from the series’ run, Jiminez, Weston and either Yeowell or Thompson one issue each, or split up the story threads between them. The jam works okay when there’s a logic behind the art changes, it only falls apart when things shift within a scene, the continuity suffers and the emotion of the story decreases. Even Grant claims that it was a failure, but I guess it seemed like a good idea at the time....
I've taken down my posts on The Invisibles because they're all coming out in book form. The book, Our Sentence is Up, features revised and expanded versions of each blog post, covering every issue of The Invisibles, plus an extensive interview with Morrison himself. Visit your local comic store and order a copy now!
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"Imagine this space-time even which we call Rogers as a long pink worm, continuous through the years, one end at his mother's womb, the other at the grave. It stretches past us here and the cross-section we see appears as a single discrete body. But that is illusion. There is physical continuity to this pink worm, enduring through the years. As a matter of fact there is physical continuity in this concept for the entire race, for these pink worms branch off from other pink worms. In this fashion the race is like a vine whose branches intertwine and send out shoots. Only by taking a cross-section of the vine would we fall into the error of believing that the shootlets were discrete individuals."
That's from a story called "Life Line" written in 1939 by Robert Heinlein. You might not immediately think of Morrison and Heinlein as kindred spirits, but there it is...
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