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The Invisisbles: Okay, Grant Morrison, What The Hell?


I recently read through all of Grant Morrison's Invisibles. I've been hearing a lot of good things about it, and the most prolific rumor was that the Wachowski brothers' Matrix movies were more than a little based on it. To the point where Grant Morrison was reportedly watching the first movie and saying "wow, this is a really great movie... wait a minute, this is my comic!"

I've read a lot of his stuff before, and I've loved just about everything I've read, from the cybernetically augmented animals of We3, to the unbelievably grand scope of Seven Soldiers. So, I figured, "it's time for the Invisibles!"

I gotta say, right from the start, I didn't really understand what was going on. It kind of reminds me of the Illuminatus Trilogy, by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson (highly recommended by the way), where everyone's got their own theory of how reality works, and they all seem equally plausible, but no one seems to really be proven right or wrong by the end of the story.

One of those theories was passably similar to the premise of Matrix, but it was only near the very end of the story that it came about.

Sorry if this review is a bit rambling, I really can't decide how I feel about this book, and it's such a long rambling story on it's own... In the beginning there is a very slow build up, then things get awesome and delightfully weird, with all kinds of freaky aliens and eldritch horrors from nether dimensions, sprinkled with some great action sequences mostly centered around Grant Morrison's self insertion character, King Mob. But in the end, it just kind of fizzled. We end up in the future that everyone's been fighting to make a reality, and I just didn't really understand it.

It's a fun ride, so I guess if the ride's more important than the destination, this book is probably for you. If I had known that going in, I might not have been as bothered by the ending as I was, but I was expecting something profound, which is how Morrison normally ends his epic stories.
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