| |
|
Admittedly, asking the book to stand up to the rigors of the quantum discussion on Barbelith + Babcock is unreasonable, but…
so far I’ve found it to be light-weight on:
1) panel by panel annotation
2) describing the making of the book. Grant’s interview is quite good, but the rest of the interviews seem fluffy + mostly pointless- lots of talk about how Grant was late with scripts, which characters were hard to draw, and mostly how Grant never seemed to communicate much with them. Can you imagine how much more entertaining it would have been to get Millar, Ellis, Milligan, Rushkoff et al to comment on the impact of the book, their impressions of the man, etc?
+ I totally fail to see the point of:
1) the authors’ commentary on each chapter, seemingly written immediately after picking up each issue @ the comix shop. They spend a lot of time talking about which characters they now like, + making fairly empty claims as to whether each issue was good or bad. the invisibles, like many of morrison’s books, is better absorbed as story arcs if you’re fixated on plot resolution or uncomfortable with ambiguity. Assuming that most new readers (who will come to the book after seeing the movie) will be reading TPBs, this feature strikes me as a total waste of copy.
2) character bios. This seems appropriate as an appendix to an English Lit thesis- it actually does point out some threads that I failed to connect in my own head, but it’s rather antiseptic. King Mob likes cookies? Elfayed may be gay? Grant portrays the characters in a strongly disjointed fashion- thru the lenses of time-travel, multiple personalities, and the different genres + tropes used in the series. I wish the bios were more conscious of the archetypal and dynamic aspects of the characters.
All in all I find the book to be remarkably joyless- it seems to spend a great deal of energy pointing out how the series barely came together, or where it lacks credibility- even when Grant was clever enough to point this out repeatedly in the series itself! Meanwhile many extremely literary themes, conflicts + episodes go totally unmentioned.
I’ve learned a great deal from the Invisibles, + I’ve had good results explaining concepts to people just by showing them sections of the book. I would really like to take account of some of the main themes- not necessarily to provide definitive readings, but to help people dig some of the depth. (In an aside, I have to wonder if Grant wants to avoid this- good ontological writing works best @ an unconscious level I reckon).
Big conflicts/debates in the series that should be available on the web (@ barbelith?):
1) Romanticism vs. enlightenment
2) Existentialism vs. nihilism (they call Nietzsche existentialist! ackkk!)
3) Free-will vs. pre-destination
4) race, gender, colonialism
5) anarchism, futurism, post-modernism
It would also be fun to dissect some of the more dense scenes- for example, Jim Crow’s fable in Black Science 2.
OK, rant over. Am I just bitchin’ here? |
|
|
