posted March 02, 2000 11:59 PM            

but.

for some reason, i love it. it makes sense that it doesn't make sense, if you know what i mean. it feels the last episode of the prisoner all over again; what you give is what you get. i dunno. i don't think any ending would've lived up to what we all wanted, and i'm not really sure i even really cared how things "turned out"... after all, the series has served its purpose by now anyway, hasn't it? without wanting to sound wanky or freaky, somewhere along the line, the invisibles as a story became less important than as a source of ideas and possibilites (and a route here, where i - hey!- met every single lovely one of y'all. feel the love)...

(on another subject: broadarrow: your pages are fucking lovely, my friend - yeah, the colours are too bright and don't help the thing at all, but they don't hide the fact that you are a fucking talented bastard. i am a fan. so, where can we see your stuff next?)

posted March 03, 2000 12:18 AM         

Got what I wanted awhile back, and for better or worse, it's been a good ride. "Endings" are not always as clean as we like, and the idea of "closure" is, well... overrated. Only the one's who feel left behind ever want closure. I know that one from personal experience. So, some of it sucked ass. Most of it kicked that same ass repeatedly and without fail, delivering a mind bender of a journey unparralled by any other. There's always bound to be disappointment when we place so much expectation in the words and ideas of another. Choose your own adventure.

posted March 03, 2000 01:01 AM            

Look what Grant tried to cram into one issue here:

The manifestation of the Archons
The return of John a Dreams
Death of Jolly Roger
Fanny v. Orlando part deux
Jack on the UFO with Satan again
The Identity of the Harlequinade revealed
Sir Miles's "treachery" and death
(did any one actually understand what Miles was on about? How was the shadow king one of the invisibles all along as he claimed? What was his relationship to Mad Tom? What is his relationship to Judas? (I want to refer to Borges in the discussion of that one)
the aftermath of the above events
denouement

That's about one major event per two pages, where things like Jack's trip in the UFO and fanny's first fight with orlando last over a half an issue by themselves.

posted March 03, 2000 02:24 AM            

As for the nexus Jam 3.2? Sounds good to me. As a master of the stick figure I think i could do a pretty bang up job (speaking of which, stay tuned for http://www.justicesquad.com/ for my online webcomic, featuring the funniest Hitler ever. Give it a few months though, i'm very lazy)

Does it really matter how long King Mob was in the hospital for? Even if it was just a day. Just because he left the hospital, doesn't mean his wounds were completely healed. King Mob doesn't seem like the type who waits for the doctor to release him. Plus, the cops were coming, what was he suppossed to do?

posted March 03, 2000 02:40 AM            

P.12, Frame 1: <bunch of preamble stressing the importance of these pages, and how they should look very special. Ha!>...Jack is walking with Satan - as seen in V.2:20 - through the devastated London of the Outer Church.

Frame 3: Jack ans Satan walk across the dreadful wasteland past the girl with the baby. We follow them. Up ahead, there are huge grotesque Chris Weston bug-things glimpsed through a swirl of toxic mist. Beyond that, we see what could be towersm like Westminster in the haze of the bleached horizon. This is a world of endless repeating horror, defoliated and bombed and roamed by the monsters of the Outer Church.

Frame 5: Jack and Satan walk under the hideous flea-monstrosities. Jack looks up at the horrors which really don't seem so horrible after all.

posted March 03, 2000 02:45 AM            

Frame 3: Longshot following Jack and Satan towards the Invisible College, alive with lights in the wonderful twilight. Three figures wait ahead, silhouetted by the green light of an eerie floating circle. We've never seen the Invisible College from here before. We're behind it and there's a river with a bridge and the general ambience is of dreaming spires and scholarly evenings.

Frame 5: Jack turns his head and we see the movement as a process through time, like a solid timelapse, bone merging to bone, the turning mouth like a yawning gash of teeth, the eyes repeated.

posted March 03, 2000 02:49 AM            

Artwise, there was some great stuff in there and some total screw-ups. When I first turned the page and saw the Pander Bros art there, I thought it fit the moment perfectly. The Bros have always been connected to the madness of Christine Spar in my mind. However as the book progressed it became obvious that the art wasnít communicating the ideas in the script very well. This goes doubly true for Mr. Woodís pages. I love his art most of the time but it was fairly obvious that there was a disturbing gulf between the art and the text. Apparently Ridgeway blew some major panels as well, especially the ìmurderî and eclipse bits.

I think the ìJamî worked a lot better when it was one artist mimicking the other styles. However despite itís many flaws I thought there was a nice cut-up feel to the art.

Storywise I canít help but call this ish amazing. Wow, everything I expected to be wrapped up was, King Mob dies, Jack comes into his own, Division X lives to ride again, Frosty spills all, Miles fulfills the plan. All very beautiful stuff.

While I do have some problems with the ishís presentation, and I seriously want to know what REALLY was happening on 12-14, I thought this was damn satisfying.

Sides, why wrap up everything? I distinctly remembering this guy with a wicked grin offering me a blank badge on the last pageÖ

Annotations-wise: Mr. Six was most likely reading from the grimore that Helga was pasting together a while back.

posted March 03, 2000 02:51 AM            

Frame 2: Pull back from the moment, Jack extends into the future also and the future is seen as a steaming amniotic information broth in which potential forms are curled in wait.

Frame 3: And back in a great knotted life cast - the shape we make in the surrounding space as we progress through time.

Frame 4: 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.

posted March 03, 2000 02:51 AM            

So there you go. This whole sequence really DOES seem climactic, and when I first read the script in December, I was confounded as to how anyone could draw this, but also stricken by its power and beauty.

posted March 03, 2000 03:05 AM            

[This message has been edited by Broad Arrow Jack (edited March 03, 2000).]

posted March 03, 2000 03:56 AM            

The High Church of Shaggy-Doo officially declares a Crusade against the Pander Brothers, the agents of the Anti-Scooby.

Think it would have been better if (God forgive me) KM had died...literally.

However, it would have been a nice touch if Dane WAS the teacher/headmaster in the last scene...the circle is complete, he's the new Mister Six...and we're reaching the rebellious youth of the world not through violence (Dane's early mistake) but through education, knowledge, and compassion. "Make friends with 'em until they beg for mercy..." or whatever it was that Dane told KM in the last issue.

The last image saved the issue for me.

** Here's to hoping that Issue 1 REALLY wraps things up.**

But death to the Panders! and Vozzo!

posted March 03, 2000 04:22 AM            

King Mob died in the phone booth, Gideon walked out.

BAJ: Wow, that scene sounds fantastic. It's a shame thar Wood proved himself nowhere near up to the task. Personally I'm thinking Boland might have been the man for the job.

And what's with Ridgeway using the "swirly cover collage" instead of drawing in the cast?

posted March 03, 2000 05:01 AM            

"The next few pages are probably the most important in the whole series - this is the grand unveiling that the readers have been waiting for since 1994. There's some pretty weird shit visuals here, so stretch. We're defining a whole new cosmology here, so let's really make it pretty."

posted March 03, 2000 05:28 AM            

I also kinda liked the Pander Bros pages, but it ain't no Grendel, thaas for sure.

I'm not convinced Miles died in the conventional sense. More as the sacrifice for wisdom (Hanged Man) thing. Maybe he died biologically, but if he did, then it had a psycho-spiritual cause, thanks to the drugs.

I was a bit disappointed by the non-chalant way Jack ate the Archons, but I think I get it now: he really *is* the incarnation of the New Age, right? They're part of the old age. He's been on their turf already, thanks to the UFO/Chessman. So he's the one who possesses them, cuz the time is right.

And whoever asked about the midwives, well... they're ushering in the new aeon, where duality splits up. The Order buffs were convinced this had to be a literal child who would become a puppet of the Order Archons, but our boys knew better. The baby is the new world. Jack and the Harlequinade are the midwives. Don't think about them.

I was also pleased Cell 23 popped up again.

Page 9,panels 3& 4, John pretty much explains the stuff we've hashed over here already. Once you're outside the system, there are no good guys and bad guys. Your fear of the insect is unhealthy -- just slough that scaffolding off.

posted March 03, 2000 06:28 AM            

Just having a read-through of the script, to see if I could pick out any more differences, and I came upon this:

Page 16, Frame 4: <blah blah...Miles is in the shape of Hanged Man from Tarot...etc> ...The Book, jerked from his hands, flies apart. SIX pages fall. <emphasis mine>

Now, I don't know if it's significant, but the specific mention of SIX pages seems strange.

posted March 03, 2000 06:59 AM            

Exit Six and enter Miles? What could be more fun than being an international playboy and psychic detective? Being the villain in a Bond film, of course.

posted March 03, 2000 07:01 AM            

Waaaaaaaaay back, ages ago, when everyone was assuming that the woman facing KM on the cover was Robin, I stepped in and dropped the hint that it was someone else. The next assumption was Helga, which is still a valid guess and certainly does make sense.

BUT, and I don't definitively know this (covers aren't described in the scripts), but given the events of pages 19 and 20, I had always assumed that it was Audrey Murray.

posted March 03, 2000 11:10 AM            

notice how the hand of glory was in quotation marks when Oscar namechecks it on page 18.

posted March 03, 2000 12:01 PM            

I had ideas about the time crystal etc, but it would have been nice if the progression through reality's layers (laid out on page 14) had been made a bit clearer. A sense of progressively rising "above" the previous "layer" would have made more sense (in fact it's the obvious way to handle this sequence). Balls.

posted March 03, 2000 01:23 PM            

I've got a challenge for you. You have the script and we would all like to see a closer aproximation of what is in the script on paper, and given that the response to your stuff has largely been favourable

posted March 03, 2000 02:34 PM            

I'm really disappointed but I think that it's clear that the script could not be clearly transformed into a comic page without the help of an editor and Mr Morrison himself. It was laziness all around. I refuse to blame any one artist. I myself can't stand Jill Thompson, but I would never say she 'ruined the comic' or 'was lazy.'

From what BAJ has shown us it can be seen that the old Mozzster hisself was writing a bizarre poetic description of humanity as a worm, then followed it with 'Panel Three.' These are valid images and good ideas and after seeing the script I think the comic is a bit more understandable... BUT the finished product is a mess and I find it hard to believe that the editor and Grant himself hadn't seen them before they were published. I know that if it were me writing it, I'd wantthose fucking pages on my desk for a day to look them over before the even heard the word 'press.'

The whole ending is explained very well by our own grant (the nexus version) and I thank him for it.

But still... I think it's not just what Grant has been writing, but the way it has been presented that has been crapo, and if you look through volume three, the hints of a gigantic brain fart are there all along.

Recently, as a side note, I bought the Winter's Edge 1 with the Gideon story in it. When I did buy it, I cursed Morrison under my breath and the teller laughed. We both shared that back in the day we siggested Invisibles to our friends (I'd even give extra copies to friends and read the annotations at night... I have a notebook of them next to my bookshelf, seeing them as a work themselves), but recently have been saying to the same folks, "Don't bother catching up, you've read the best."

Sad, really.

posted March 03, 2000 02:35 PM            

Personally, I wish those pages could be redone. Of course, in my personal dream world, they would have been done by John Totleben.

OG

posted March 03, 2000 05:43 PM            

Entirely agreeing with Sandfarmer and Ganesha.

We're very fortunate that BAJ was there to provide us some very beautiful pages.

posted March 03, 2000 06:24 PM         

-Death to the Pander bros!

-Ashley Wood killed Grant's climax.

-BAJ's art was delicious. He should have done the whole issue. The whole arc. The whole volume! THE WHOLE SERIES, DAMMIT!!
um, him and Phil Jiminez.

-Daniel Vozzo, boo...

-Remember, issue 1 is the end...