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Underground > Comic Books >

The Invisible College and the Glass Ceiling

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ONLY NICE THINGS

14:20 / 16.04.02

Said by Count Adam elsewhere.

Oh, and his oft-spouted opinion on the Invisibles being sexist needs more evidence to back it up, because it ain't very convincing.

Now, poisonally I have never encountered this thesis, much less "oft-spouted it, except possibly as a way to upset fatbeards (it's got really strong positive female role models. There's this enchantress with a magic sword...). I have, IIRC, suggested that the Invisibles has at its core the fanboy wish-fulfilment of a comics lover. Could you find even one spouting, Adam?

But it's an interesting question. Does the Invisibles fall into the ideological traps that its protagonsists are supposed to be helping humanity to evolve beyond?

F'r example, does Lord Fanny ever actually get a shag if she isn't being raped or deceived by evil agents of a foreign power? If Jolly Roger is so butch, how come she a) has to rely on King Mob to get her out of trouble all the time and b) she flirts with him constantly. Is Ragged Robin's relationship with King Mob anything more than Grant Morrison finally getting one of his avatars to nob Ragged Robin, the sexy schizo with the looks the boys love? Of the two black main characters, why is one of them into voodoo and the other good at fighting? And what what what is the point of Helga?

Any more for any more?

The Natural Way

14:27 / 16.04.02

Fanny shags that guy in New Orleans.

Matthew Fluxington

14:36 / 16.04.02

Hey.

Would someone mind attempting to answer Haus' question about Helga? I am at a loss right now to come up with a reasonable justification for why she's in the series, even though I quite liked that character, along with Mason and Jack...

14:43 / 16.04.02

Helga is a girl genius. Not a boy genius.

She and Roger are also like two splits of King Mob's psyche - the smarty, fashion/modification side, and the vicious, gun-toting side.

14:47 / 16.04.02

I don't see the Invisibles and sexist or homophobic in particular. Racism may be closer to the mark....

1.) Isn't there an implication of a threesome between KM, LF, and Helga at the end of one of the volume 3 issues? And there is that guy at Mardi Gras as Runce mentions.

2.) Jolly Roger leads her own team, which, okay, does get annihilated. I don't recall her flirting with King Mob, really. The banter between the two was more redolent of locker room jivetalking than anything else.

3.) Ragged Robin's relationship with King Mob - Robin's a sex object, sure. Is a sexism-free society necessarily devoid of sex objects? Given the free-wheelin' polymorphous perversity espoused by the sex-positive elements of the progressive or liberating cadres, I'd say no.

4.) Black main characters - One of them being into Voodoo... Would you prefer a "white" Voodoo practicioner? If there's going to be a Voodoo element in the story, the main character involved in that the story would almost by necessity be black, no?

As for Boy, I think it is commonly agreed that she's the least well developed character of the bunch. Her ridiculous origin story in volume 1 was a White Scottish Man's version of hip-hop culture.

5.) What's the point of Helga? I'm not sure about that either? super-genius sex object instead of crazy schizo sex object?

One of the best arguments against the sexism of the invisibles would be the character of Edith. Edith can cow King Mob with a single word, understands the secrets of the universe and gets wrecked on drugs into her 90s.

Matthew Fluxington

14:56 / 16.04.02

Isn't King Mob supposed to be a sex object too?

The Natural Way

15:24 / 16.04.02

Oh, definitely. But he's fleshed out to a far greater extent than his 'babes'.

Helga's a linguist - far more interested in decoding the alien language than blowing up Myrmidons. And she's there to balance out the cell's elements (I imagine, but fuck knows who is and isn't part of the cell in vol 3). And what Grant said. And the whole Ornothocrasi/Black Mother psychofuck pulled on Sir Miles.... She marks the dawn of a new era/approach to Invisible operations, I guess.

Oh, and she's there to fuck King Mob.

15:28 / 16.04.02

Nah, she's there to fuck his potato. That's different.

15:31 / 16.04.02

...does Lord Fanny ever actually get a shag if she isn't being raped or deceived by evil agents of a foreign power?

We see Fanny rather joyously on the prowl in volume 3. But there is a larger point in Fanny's somewhat tortured love life--the prostitution, the rape and degradation: it's hir conscious decision, hir shamanic sacrifice for the sake of power.

The SHEMAN arc, I thought, made it quite clear. Hir offering to Tezcatlipoca, hir alchemical nigredo: transmuting shit into gold, transmuting ugly, loveless sex into magick.

I, for one, had tremendous sympathy and affection for Fanny and the lonely road s/he walked. Hir sacrifice, as framed, made hir a tragic character, rather than merely "sad."

16:00 / 16.04.02

Haus - I'd say the Invisibles is a fat lot of Grant Morrison personal wish-fulfilment...oh, sorry, I meant "narrative hypersigil." Everything else stems from there.

I'm not sure I can attack Sexist/Racist/Homophobic head on, but here's some thoughts.

- How is the character "Boy" a token of normalcy, prior to be constructed as a female or an African-American? The other members of the cell all possess a series of flamboyant shticks, many of which pair off with elements of various types of sub-/counter-culture. She has no magical/super powers, she's not an uber-assassin. How much is the sense of her under-representation a matter of the fact that she lacks flash? Indeed, it seems to me her placement as a cop with a conscious withdrawal from "hip-hop" culture in any sense further codes her as the character most out of water in the Invisibles ethic, the one most grounded in "normal life" with all its disfunctions and lack of magical-ness/revolutionariness.

- In the same vein, to what degree is it a service or disservice to "real life" subculture members to create hyperbolic archetypes of subaltern groups? I mean, let's face it: Jack, KM, Lord Fanny, Jim Crow, etc., are all Rabelaisian in proportions.

- Jim Crow. My thought was always that his appearance, mannerisms, were self-consciously constructed to include a jumble, a chimera, of contra-ideal [white] stereotypes. His back story, as much as we get it, is as a larger-than-life rapper who makes his bread-and-butter selling voodoo spookiness and big-scary-badass imagery, all coupled with a vague breed of Black Nationalism. Indeed, if my comics were not on loan, I think you could take a full-on drawing of him and break down all of the bits and pieces of flash into specific referents of different Black Stereotypes. He's equal parts Dogon, gangster rapper, 1920s high-stepper (the monocle, tails), savage (bone in his nose), Rastafarian (dreadlocks), voodoo child by way of Screamin' Jay Hawkins and that fellow in that one Bond film (any number of things)....

- The Nipponese sterotypes are hard in effect: Zen Monk, science guy, Yakuza, Shoko Ashara cultist.... Grumble.

yawn - thing's buddy

19:36 / 16.04.02

dig dis:
boys story was fine. actually it was very good. homey's dissin this epi-soh dih are missing the point. it was tv cop show and it allowed a quick glimpse through the media lense used to 'focus' book two. (amongst other things, of course)

I fuckin love boys story.

As for boy not being developed or interesting or whatver else neh gah tih vih you crazy motherfuckers are talking about, what about her deprogramming sequence and the shit cell 23 played with the Invisibles.

I loved all that. I love cell 23. They were far cooler than the poxy invisibles and their duff leader king mob.

Actually i hated King Mob.

i thought he was shit.

Helga: now, shes the kinds of girl who make girlfriends very jealous.

20:02 / 16.04.02

Must agree. The only time when KM is really interesting is in the last issue - but then he's no longer "narrator".

yawn - thing's buddy

20:12 / 16.04.02

interesting point

21:37 / 16.04.02

I fuckin love boys story.

Me too. I think it's one of the most effective issues of the entire series .. don't know why everyone says it's rubbish..

We see Fanny rather joyously on the prowl in volume 3. But there is a larger point in Fanny's somewhat tortured love life--the prostitution, the rape and degradation: it's hir conscious decision, hir shamanic sacrifice for the sake of power.

Yes.

Of the two black main characters, why is one of them into voodoo and the other good at fighting?

Well, it's a comic about kung-fu fighting magickal revolutionary types .. they'd have been a bit rubbish if one was into accounting and the other one was good at pottery.. (and in what way exactly does making a black character 'good at fighting' equate with racism? I mean, even leaving aside the fact that just about everyone in the Inivsibles is also 'good at fighting'..)

No star here laces

00:21 / 17.04.02

Next up: sexism, racism and poor narrative generally in Pete Milligan's "Bad Company"...

Um, no female characters apart from one who wears a bikini and does 'healing'. Only black character dies in episode three to consternation of narrator ("argh! they killed blacky!"). All aliens innately evil.

Whatever...

00:49 / 17.04.02

"We see Fanny rather joyously on the prowl in volume 3. But there is a larger point in Fanny's somewhat tortured love life--the prostitution, the rape and degradation: it's hir conscious decision, hir shamanic sacrifice for the sake of power."

Yeah, and there are justifications within the narrative of, say, Gas Pump Girls for why the chicks keep getting their tits out. That doesn't mean it isn't sexist, or, indeed, have anything to do with questions of sexism.

Maybe I'm wrong, but The Invisibles always seemed to me to be mainly about Jack and KM - basically, about their male-bonding (yeah, I know it's also about the meaning of the universe and that, I mean on a character level). All the other characters are pretty slight - and that 'happens' to include all the women, all the nonwhite characters, all the nonheterosexuals, etc. Beyond that, a bunch of those other characters are stereotyped in ways that range - depending on your perspective - from annoying to pop-brilliant to offensive.

I think it's a good story, but I think its fucked up in plenty of ways.

Nietzsch E. Coyote

03:43 / 17.04.02

Sexist maybe, Racist possibly. Homophobic I don't buy it. A homophobic comic book would not even include a homosexual let alone a lesbian cell, a woman named boy, and Lord Fanny. Boy's back history is that of Saul from the Illuminatus trilogy. Lord Fanny is written with great sympathy. Jolly Roger, well maybe she is treated poorly but... an ugly female comic hero? She had to be second-rate. <--(joking)

06:38 / 17.04.02

crunchy - - i think that equation is actually fairly offensive. a porn movie doesn't make commentary about sexuality, or force you to think about the nature of gender interaction; in fact, that's the true definition of pornography, that is serves no other purpose than to titilate and arouse. (which is why ulysses and naked lunch, in their times, were ALSO accused of being poetry. my three favorite works, these are!)/

grant's story about fanny raises intricate questions about sexuality, especially insofar as it challenges some assumptions about what constitutes "normal" sex. are we mad at fanny because "she" does have sex or doesn't have sex? from the posts above, it seems we're going either way. or are we mad because "she" doesn't get dinner and a movie before "she" has sex with demonic entities? seems to me that the work of her storylines has a lot to do with expanding our concept of acceptable sexuality, in the metaphorised externalized way that fantastic fiction operates in. i'm not sure sexuality can be depicted in art without being in part itself sexy, and if everytime we see sexy art we call it sexist than we are confounding sexism with sex itself. which is quite repressive.

if you're suggesting that invisibles, like "gas pump girls" is pornography, i would be curious to hear example of non pornographic work about sexuality that you think works.

07:12 / 17.04.02

First of all, I find your definition of pornography completely bizarre, since many avowedly and obviously pornographic works do make you think about gender, sexuality and plenty of other things beside. But it's beside the point, because I wasn't calling The Invisibles or, indeed, Gas Pump Girls pornos. My point related to the difference between reasons for something within the story, and reasons outside it; the difference, for example, between the various circumstances that get girls tops off in GPG, and the social forces that lead to the production of a film where a lot of girls get their tops off. Or, the difference between the narrative device whereby Fanny is chosen by the lord of filth, thus obliging her to have lots of degrading sex, and the social forces that lead to the production of a comic where a tranny has lots of degrading sex.

Now, to clarify, I am not saying the social forces are the same in the two cases. I am criticising the logic that said, 'complaints about Fanny's degrading role are irrelevant because she was chosen by the lord of filth'. It's like claiming you couldn't say Gas Pump Girls is sexist, because they were only taking their tops off to distract the mafia thugs.

I am only going on about Gas Pump Girls because I say it the other night.

ONLY NICE THINGS

08:39 / 17.04.02

Rizla:

and in what way exactly does making a black character 'good at fighting' equate with racism?

Boy is "good at fighting" and nowt else. She's not a mystic, or a Zen assassin, or a techno-goddess from the future. And as for the racial component - black people and violence:

another point: if i get on a bus in hackney and i see a gang of [black] teenage boys get on, i want to get off. does this make me a racist? bear in mind:

- nearly every single time a gang gets on a bus the following happens: the driver is refused payment, is talked to like ze is a piece of shit; there is a fight; one or more members of the gang attempt to intimidate the rest of the passengers as much as possible.

[black] girl gangs can be pretty nasty, too. i will also avoid them if i can.

This is another discussion, of course.

ONLY NICE THINGS

08:47 / 17.04.02

Lyra: Mac is black, IIRC - it just doesn't get mentioned much. Not all aliens are evil - even the Krool are not "evil" as such - quo vide Kano's winged companion in Bad Company 2, who is killed by humans. Specifically, by a white male.

Aaaaaahhhhh.

yawn - thing's buddy

08:53 / 17.04.02

one thing the hive mind on this thread is forgetting:

boy rejects the invisibles and their lifestyle.

this is important.

innit.

09:37 / 17.04.02

definitely, "yawn" -- one gets half a sense that she's saying, screw this superhero crap with these retarded white boys and their power fantasies... as if she is critiquing her role in the text by willfulling stepping outside it...

as far as "pornography" -- yes of course you "can" think about social issues when reading the text of porn in the same way that you "can" think about the demographic implicaitons of cereal mascots when eating breakfast. but the legal and linguistic definitions of pornography revolve around intention, so as to distinguish, for example, a larry clark movie or baise moi from [insert silly porn title here].

i think because i said "force you" and not "intend you" my definition sounded silly, but in its revised form i stick by it.

are you making an argument about grant morrison the person and his intentions in creating sex scenes? i don't mean to be defending the scenes from the plot-necessity you imply ("you fool! she's only naked because the monster HAD to tear off her dress in order to expose her soft flesh!") but i am insisting -- shrilly now, and against my better judgement -- that the invisibles depicts sex in order to question and convolute our ideas about sexuality, in the same way that Molly Bloom's lurid accounts of anal sex in Ulysses do the same. i'm not being facecious when i ask, is there a scene of sexuality in art you could discuss that does not fall prey to this set of criticism?

10:44 / 17.04.02

Did I mention sex scenes anywhere? Because I don't think I did, and if I did, I didn't mean to. I am not saying that the sex scenes in The Invisibles are bad, or that sex scenes are bad generally, I am indeed all for sex scenes, both good and bad kinds.

I am under the impression that I've been talking mainly about characterisation. Using Gas Pump Girls as an example may have made that unclear but, like I say, I saw it the other night (and like it a lot, although it wasn't as good as Motel Hell, which it played with).

11:54 / 17.04.02

/Off Topic/ All kinds of critters go into Farmer Vincent's Fritters/Off Topic

16:30 / 17.04.02

Here's an argument for you: of the two straight Anglo male protagonists (Jack and Gideon), why are they both violent sociopaths? Is this what Grant thinks of caucasian breeder boys--that we're all book-burning, car-thieving, amoral cunts? Why's Grant got a hate on for whitey?

Could the argument be made argue that Jack and the King are stand-ins for the entirety of their ethnicity or gender or sexuality? Or are they nothing more or less than characters in a story, whose behaviors and choices must be (indeed, can only be) judged within the context of the story?

And if that is so, why do we apply different standards of judgement to the depictions of characters who "stray" from the straight-white-male baseline? I mean, if heteronormacy is indeed a pernicious myth...

Let's face it, everybody in THE INVISIBLES is pretty fucked up: they just cover it up in different ways, is all.

You know. Like in real life.

16:50 / 17.04.02

The other straight male protagonist, Mason, is a rich capitalist momma's boy.

22:55 / 17.04.02

Wow, haus really needs to reread the Invisibles.

First of all fanny gets alot of sex. ANd s/he doesn't get fooled much by enemy agents except for once in Volume 1.

Jolly Roger does not rely on King Mob. She comes back to Mason's house because that's where her group goes when they fuck up. And she doesn't flirt with him constantly. They're best friends.

Uhm... since when is Ragged Robyn schizo? And she only began to be romantically interested in K.M. in volume 2. But yes. The only point to their sexual relationship is that Morrison wanted to give K.M. "an easy time" in order to prevent any more micro/macrocosm incidents which tended to hurt Morrison's health.

Why is one black character into voodoo? Well, why not?

And why is the other one good at fighting? Don't you remember? WEvery member of the cell was taught to fight. Boy was important because she had contacts and she made a good investigator. Plus she was brought over from the other side. She was brought over from the side of control to the side of the Invisibles and the joke, however unintentional, was that she saw that both sides were basically the same thing.

Helga is a genius linguist. She is one of the main magicians in the comic book. She's there to get Morrison more sex.

What really interests me is people saying that some of the characters are stereotypical. You forget that a stereotype is the attributiion of the qualities of some or most people from a group to a group itself. Basically Takashi being a smart Japanese person isn't stereotypical. It's saying that ALL Japanese people are smart which is stereotypical. Morrison never does anytrhing like that.

Oh, and the Invisibles aren't mainly about the relationship between Jack and K.M. though that is a major plotline. You have to remember, though, that Jack and K.M. are only together for small periods of time in the whole series.

Almost nobody in the Invisibles is fucked up. It's semantics actually. All people are fucked up at different moments in their lives.

!!!MONKEY!!!

23:02 / 17.04.02

Damn I miss hearty discussions about the Invisibles like this one. Thanks to you guys, I had to go out and finally buy Entropy in the UK so I can palm this story to other people. Curse you. Curse you all.

23:54 / 17.04.02

And if that is so, why do we apply different standards of judgement to the depictions of characters who "stray" from the straight-white-male baseline? I mean, if heteronormacy is indeed a pernicious myth...

it is an inescapable fact that part of our reading of characters in art is that we have to interpret their race. if it's the case that when a comic is about healthy white men we don't have a racial interpretation and when it is otherwise, we do, this is a beef to take up against history itself. yes, it sucks that the world is like that. it sucks that developing countries hate americans. but we can't close our eyes to the issues, nnor can we blame the individuals enacting the giant wave of history. we have to turn our anger at history itself and then see where that criticism can take us.

in the case of boy, it's actually quite interesting that the character who is MOST LIKE THE READER, in that she is not a powerful witch from the future, young buddha in traning, billionaire playboy -- is a black woman. i doubt i'm going out on a limb to suggest the the african american female readership for the invisibles is a very small percentage, yet life and personality structure the readership has most in common with is boy. and hell, her own personal comic-book-like mad adventures turn out to be -- like the reader's -- a FANTASY.

it is almost as though the reader is given someone to easily identify with but then made to feel confused about it -- "oh wait, i don't want to identify with a black woman, hold on... she's boring." that's a stretch, but it is worth considering.

it's also interesting how she has this almost, but compltetely failed romance with dane -- the other character we are most likely to identify with. the failure of this relationship speaks a lot about the ways in which boy is or is not sexualized as a character. i mean, i almost feel that on the one hand, people complain that fanny and robin are over sexualized and then find boy to be incomplete -- perhaps, i would submit, because she's not sexualized.

00:01 / 18.04.02

"the two straight Anglo male protagonists (Jack and Gideon), why are they both violent sociopaths"

um - why is jack a violent sociopath? the way i remember - and i'm prolly rusty - he kills one guy in the whole book, and gets really upset about it?

a few posts in this thread seem to argue that you can never consider a fictional character stereotypical - either because their "behaviors and choices must be (indeed, can only be) judged within the context of the story" or because "a stereotype is the attributiion of the qualities of some or most people from a group to a group itself". is that what you're saying - that there are no stereotypical characters in any kind of fiction?

"The only point to their sexual relationship is that Morrison wanted to give K.M. "an easy time" in order to prevent any more micro/macrocosm incidents which tended to hurt Morrison's health."

classic!

Haus about we all give each other a big lovely huggle?

08:23 / 18.04.02

Basically Takashi being a smart Japanese person isn't stereotypical. It's saying that ALL Japanese people are smart which is stereotypical. Morrison never does anything like that.

But then...the other Japanese characters are an insane Yakuza-style hitman, a contemplative paper-folder and an Aum Shinrikyo-like fanatic...

But the Invisibles is meant to be about all the conspiracy theories, and then all the movie cliches, being true. So maybe that's the point...

ONLY NICE THINGS

09:48 / 18.04.02

Wow, haus really needs to reread the Invisibles.

Who said I'd read the Invisibles? I'm just canvassing opinion.

I notice Count Adam has yet to mention where I have "oft" propounded their sexism. by the way.

13:22 / 18.04.02

um - why is jack a violent sociopath?

I'm loath to even defend this argument, because it's a straw man, set up for satiric purposes. That said...

When we first meet Jack, he's hurling a Molotov cocktail, stealing cars, burning books, and kicking the shit out of a sympathetic teacher—an alienated, vicious little hooligan, as Sir Miles uncharitably (though accurately) labels him.

One could argue that, although he eventually sublimates the violence, channeling his energies into more useful directions as the series progresses, the rage and the antisocial nature are in the character's blueprint: Jack may be a buddha, but he is a buddha driven essentially by anger.

One could also argue that the character of Boy is insulting to black people because she's "good at fighting."

The difference is, I'll freely admit that the Jack-as-violent-sociopath argument is reductive and tunnel-visioned.

13:48 / 18.04.02

Mr. Egypt saith:

...in the case of Boy, it's actually quite interesting that the character who is MOST LIKE THE READER.... it is almost as though the reader is given someone to easily identify with but then made to feel confused about it -- "oh wait, i don't want to identify with a black woman, hold on... she's boring."

Ouch!

that's a stretch, but it is worth considering.

Indeed it is. Best point I've seen raised so far.

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