![]() ![]() The Invisibles played into millennial anxiety and humanity's fears as the sand ran out of the 20th Century's hourglass. In the world of The Invisibles, the stalwart FBI agents of the X-Files would have at best been unwitting dupes of the Outer Church, at worst the Archons' direct agents. Shows like The X-Files encouraged this and The Invisibles took the premise to that series and blasted it into the void. The '90s were awash in conspiracy theories, some involving governments, some involving aliens, some involving both. It also tapped into a familiar part of the cultural zeitgeist, conspiracy theories. Club culture, gay club culture, and hip hop culture all combine at different points in the series to really immerse readers in the '90s-ness of it all. To begin with, Morrison was just starting to get involved with the British dance scene, and all the chaos therein, so that plays a part of the book's backdrop. ![]() The Invisibles embraces all the flavors of '90s pop culture. The Invisibles would be completely different, because Morrison was able to do whatever they wanted in a world of their own creation. Morrison was limited by the rules of the world that the characters inhabited, and this was a key point in the author's conversation with Animal Man. Sure, Morrison could inject their personal beliefs about animal experimentation, hunting laws and rituals throughout the world, vegetarianism, and the like into Animal Man or their love of surrealism into Doom Patrol, but the stories were still superhero comics at their core. Morrison's personality and history informed The Invisibles in ways that it couldn't manifest in something like Animal Man. ![]() This would become an important part of The Invisibles, as Morrison based several characters on themselves, most notably King Mob, a bald anarchist assassin with a predilection for fashion and hallucinogens, and Lord Fanny, a trans woman who came from a long line of bruja. Morrison practices chaos magic, and they believed that they could change their lives by writing what they wanted into a comic book. This Animal Man story was a turning point for Morrison, who decided to make a fictional version of themselves for a comic book, as a piece of magic. A recurring plot in Animal Man was the slow revelation that Buddy Barker's life was a comic book and Morrison's last issue on Animal Man saw the title character and Morrison have a conversation about humanity and comic books. ![]() It also imported the meta-narratives that became important to Morrison's later works, including The Invisibles. Their first major DC work was Animal Man, a book that incorporated Morrison's personal beliefs about animal cruelty and environmentalism. Morrison came to DC's attention because of their work on British comic anthologies like 2000 A.D. Morrison would create their own comics before becoming a professional musician for a time then returning to comics. These comics allowed Morrison to escape the nuclear anxiety of the age and set their imagination ablaze. The child of two parents who were part of the anti-war movement of the 1960s, Morrison was exposed to two things at a young age: a fear of nuclear weapons and American comic books. Grant Morrison is a Scot who spent their early life in Glasgow. To understand The Invisibles, it's important to understand Grant Morrison and their outlook on comics, and how that outlook related to their work. ![]()
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