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Underground > Comic Books >

Ok... did anyone get Invisibles Vol.3 on November 13?

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21:39 / 13.11.02

I could of swore November 13 was the release date. So, early in the morning, a few hours before I had to leave for school, I took the 30 minute drive to the comic store in pouring rain in my old shitty car (which stalls at redlights and stop signs).

Then I get to the store and no Invisibles! I ask the clerk if they have it in back, he checks his computer and says "Oh yeah, it hasn't been released yet."

AGGHHHHHH!!!!

21:50 / 13.11.02

I got my Invisibles... but I live in Michigan... maybe shipping dates are different throughout the country/world?

Murray Hamhandler

22:09 / 13.11.02

Is out. But looky here. Or here, even.

22:18 / 13.11.02

Yes, I live in Connecticut and got my Invisibles. Sypha, I don't know where you're writing from, but if you're in the US chances are that your comic shop person just used that old "oh it's not out yet" line.

22:25 / 13.11.02

Which pages have been redrawn, and what happens in them now?

Murray Hamhandler

22:27 / 13.11.02

Our own Cam Stewart redraws Ashley Wood pages in 3.2! Expanded! Coherent!...

Or you could even look here. We have too many threads devoted to this subject! Aaaah!

23:51 / 13.11.02

The re-drawn pages in 3.2 are the 3 immediately after Dane goes into the mirror. On the surface they aren't radically different from the original pages, though there are some cool additions (the landscape shows the crashed plane and destroyed London Bridge as seen at the end of volume 2 - as well as the woman with the deformed baby). I particularly like the way the landscape becomes greener - with trees - as they approach the Invisible College. Also the repetitions of all the people as they are walking. Very nice. The whole idea of what the Blind Chessman is trying to explain is still confusing as hell (meaning even if this was the original artwork, I would have had to wrestle with it for some time to make sense of it) but this helps a lot. Praise to Cameron Stewart!

It's great to get new Invisibles material after so long, though it's sad that there's nothing left to anticipate Invisibles-wise.

Imaginary Mongoose Solutions

05:25 / 14.11.02

And Edith talking about Billy from the Karmageddon storyline has had the dialogue fixrd. Woot!

The Natural Way

11:06 / 14.11.02

Yes, but any of us who've read the script (and that's quite a lot of ye olde 'lithers) know that it wasn't only the Wood panels that took a battering. Where's our Vessica Pisces, fr instance? And, I know the swirling amalgamation of covers is supposed to be shorthand for it, but, Jesus, runx wants the whole cast peeling off the Harlequinade, the way they were s'posed to.... sniffle.... Cam's pages are nice and clear and an interesting interpretation of the script, but it's definitely an interpretation, isn't it, Cam? Where's the fractal ubermind-tree embedded in timesoil, eh? eh? No, *wot reeaally 'appned* lies somewhere inbetween Wood and Stewart's sketching - I think you need both for a fuller picture. I like the idea of different lenses on the same initiation. Very invisible.

But, anyway: yr art has a wonderful flow to it, Cam. I love yr stuff.

15:23 / 14.11.02

Thanks. Upon completion I wrote to Grant and said that I wasn't sure if my revised art was EXACTLY what he envisioned, but it was probably a lot closer than Ashley's pages.

In my defense though - let's have a look at that part of the script again:

And back - a huge centipedal tree of time, human lives extended back - the whole thing glimpsed through the smoky red light of the seething crystal sphere in which the whole monstrous anenome of all life on Earth and all the failed branches...a great timetrack expressed back to the mitochondrial roots. The trues shape of life on Earth. The spheres interset and swallow one another like hungry sphincters, collapsing and whorling tunnel vortices across the structure of the time solid - the universe as a single entity.

Add to that a hastily-sketched fax from Grant with vague thumbnail doodles covered in arrows and notations like - "Curvature of 4-D spacetime here," and "every single human life in history intertwined," the severe limitation of only ONE page on which to draw all of this, and only three days to do it all (I didn't sleep for nearly 72 hours while working on it)...and you can hopefully see that it was, you know, a bit DIFFICULT to do, and I did my best.

Bottom line is, he wasn't happy with the scene as originally drawn. Now he is.

15:28 / 14.11.02

Incidentally - it's funny to see the pages I did nearly four years ago (?) right next to the new ones - I cringed looking at them. Oh well, at least it demonstrates some artistic growth...

15:38 / 14.11.02

Yeah, the difference between the old pages and the new ones is quite distinct - I had to go back to the credits page for that issue and count in just to make sure which were the pages you originally drew. I don't think there was any need to cringe over them though. I do really like the (new) drawings of the people - Dane, the soldier, the dog - stretching back out of frames. Cool.

17:35 / 14.11.02

Yes, but any of us who've read the script (and that's quite a lot of ye olde 'lithers) know that it wasn't only the Wood panels that took a battering.

I take it from this that Ridgway's contribution to screwing the last few issues up hasn't been fixed, then? Much as I want to see Cameron's new art, I don't know if I can really justify forking out for this now...

Our Lady of The Two Towers

18:24 / 14.11.02

Yeah, with Ashley he was having to draw something that, from what Cam has posted of Grant's script wasn't that clear at all as to what it should look like. Ridgeway on the other hand, had a much easier job, with it much more clearly detailed what should be there, but then he went and did something completely different which wasn't what should have been there.

Maybe I'll put it on my Christmas present list.

21:49 / 14.11.02

I know that the Ridgeway Harliquinade page and the vescica pisces eclipse, and others, were on the list of requested revisions to the issue. I guess there wasn't time to do them all so they opted for the most important ones, i.e. my pages and the restored dialogue.

23:30 / 14.11.02

Please excuse me while I laff heartily at the idea of there not being enough time to fix the other offending panels. Not enough will, possibly, but nobody's ever seemed to be in any great rush to collect V3.

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02:37 / 15.11.02

H'mm... besides the Harelequinade thing what else did Ridgeway screw up?

(Just for the record I thought he drew Sir Miles the best).

07:36 / 15.11.02

Well, I got it last night, and a quick look makes me think ‘Yay, Cameron’ about the redone pages. Much, MUCH better, and top-notch stuff given the density of information the script excerpts show you had to fit into each panel (and the time constraints you mentioned). Very good – I know you were unhappy about the colouring on your original pages in 3.2, were they redone at all ? Haven’t had a chance to check against the original issue yet.

Anyway, a brief skim makes me realise how Vol 3 of the Invisibles, though it seemed a bit fragmented for me when originally published, contains an incredible amount of stuff that sticks with me – some great lines (‘playing a game disguised as everything’) and Edith’s death was very moving. Think I’ll have to try to restrain meself long enough to sit and read all the TPBs in one go to get the full brainbend effect.

DBC

yawn - thing's buddy

09:12 / 15.11.02

Its a fuckin classic this volume 3 number.

classic.

09:56 / 15.11.02

I never got to read these scripts but everyone else here seems to have seen them - did I miss a meeting?

The Natural Way

12:13 / 15.11.02

Yr late to the 'lith. Cameron naughtily posted the script to vol 3 #1 just after it came out, so we could all get a taste of just how fucked the art actually was. And, lo, verily it was fucked.

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13:01 / 15.11.02

Does the old link to the script still exist? I'd very much like to see it (I know bits and pieces of it appeared on The Bomb).

yawn - thing's buddy

13:42 / 15.11.02

archive.org is good for old web pages and there are Barby pages there - but no underground goddammittttt

14:01 / 15.11.02

It's in the Anarchy for the Masses book...

yawn - thing's buddy

14:32 / 15.11.02

is it really - i didn't even notice.

time for a rethink about that book.

great grant interview in it.

but?

15:30 / 15.11.02

I've had a trawl through the Barbelith archives - I completely missed out on Anarchy For The Masses so I guess I should make up for lost time and track down a copy...

20:17 / 15.11.02

I'm thinking of making a detour into central London tomorrow (en-route elsewhere ). Does anyone know if any of the usual places have copies of Anarchy For The Masses in stock? It sounds like a perfect read for a long train journey..

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20:55 / 15.11.02

None of the bookstores in my area have "anarchy for the Masses". My dad's a manager at Barnes & Noble so I had him check the database. Turns out the book was out of stock or something. Grrrr.....

22:56 / 15.11.02

It's a complete pig to get hold of, at least if you're just walking into comic shops and hoping to find one. Bristol and London shops kept telling me that they'd ordered some, but the publisher was a fairly small American one, and they didn't know when / if they'd get them. Finally found one in Forbidden Planet in Bristol.

23:15 / 15.11.02

Are there any other printed resources/commentary for the Invisibles besides Anarchy For The Masses?

(I do know about The Bomb, have spent too much time there already...)

Wrecks City-Zen

23:33 / 15.11.02

>>>Out of curiousity: Did anyone ever receive the redone pages by Cameron that he was promising to those who were interested? No offense, I just wondered what happened there<<<

Murray Hamhandler

16:50 / 16.11.02

I would've suggested the Mad Yak site, but they are apparently "completely sold out!". Sorry.

06:17 / 18.11.02

Quite what-all else was buggered? It seemed like El Franco (Quitely, that is...) did a pretty durn good job with 3.1. But then, he and Grant seem to have a pretty tight relationship.

Personally, I think Ridgway's a pretty good artist (which, I admit has got nothing to do with whether he drew what he was asked to or not). In the man's defense, I'm not really sure Grant's "entire cast boiling out of the Harlequinade" thing would've been much easier to draw than the clusterfuck that Cameron had to redraw for Ashley Wood. (Although I noticed on The Bomb yesterday that Cam pointed out that Jimenez would've given it a shot. And, IMHO, probably found a way to pull it off, more or less.)

Anyway. Guess I'm just posting to say I really enjoyed reading Vol III in one sitting. Much more concrete than when it was on the shelves in issues. Somehow, missing the millenial deadline took a lot of the wind out of The Invisibles for me, and I never was quite able to put it all back together. I have now decided to go buy all the trades, even though I own all the single issues. Something that I've only considered doing for this series, Cerebus and From Hell.

06:22 / 18.11.02

Oh yeah, what do people make of the whole "John A Dreams was Jack Flint" thing? Looking at the annotations on The Bomb, it seems that some people thought that John was the Blind Chessplayer, while other people thought John was Quimper. (White suit and all that.) I could never quite figure it out because as far as I can tell Quimper was the spirit present at Fanny's rape at the hands of the south American doods with the suits and the animal masks. At which point John was still ... well, I guess that's irrelevant given the time situation. So I guess that means that if John and Flint were one and if John put on the fiction suit to become Flint and Flint was freed from his identity and regressed back to his primal base (as Crowley says he is doing in 3.3) then he reverts to being John.

So are:

John A Dreams
Quimper
Satan / chessplayer
Flint
The Reader
Reynard

all separate entities? Who overlaps with whom?

Boy. I'd forgotten how much fun it was being confused about this stuff.

yawn - thing's buddy

11:13 / 18.11.02

Yeah, as one book, volume three is a real standout. The DeSade issue, which I read last night before drifting into baby rabbit land is an absolute corker and the diametric opposite of Tex Porneaus mansion of spunk. (I'll get slaughtered for the literal comparison but it really IS! - actiully maybe i should wait for Filth six before I shoot my mouth off.)

The email conversation between mob and edith is beautiful and defines a beautiful rythym for this particular tale (number 8). And Sean Phillips art? Why haven't we raved more about it? His Helga is probably the sexiest out there (and I lurve Bond!) and the moodiness and cartoonishness together is awesome. Karmageddon is incredible. But then so is Satanstorm - to be honest, its a story template that hasn't been recognised yet. Myself included. I was so bound up in the cryptic code of the last volume that I neglected to praise it as a STORY.

The 'between panels' narrative is mindblowingly good......oh.....I've just cum.

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