The Invisibles Vol. 1: Say You Want a Revolution | 
| Author: Grant Morrison
Publisher: Vertigo
Category: Book
List Price: $19.99
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Rating:  36 reviews
Sales Rank: 14765
Media: Paperback
Pages: 224
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 10.2 x 6.6 x 0.2
ISBN: 1563892677
Dewey Decimal Number: 741.5973
EAN: 9781563892677
ASIN: 1563892677
Publication Date: June 1, 1996
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Condition: clean pages, tight spine, ships fast!
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| Customer Reviews: Read 31 more reviews...
 Grant Morrison's opus begins HERE! September 23, 2008
Will Carper
The Invisibles.... my personal favorite series and one of the most revolutionary comics in recent history. It's fun, it's smart, it's challenging, it's got some great art and even better ideas.... and it all begins here! Meet Jack Frost, a rebellious, disaffected teenager from Liverpool, angry at life, hurting secretly on the inside ever since his father left him as a child. Jack, destined to be the next messiah, is recruited by the Invisibles, an underground band of rebels and terrorists dedicated to the ideal of freedom. The Invisibles force Jack to crack open the shell of hate and apathy he has built around his heart and let the world in a little. In the Invisibles' company, Jack is abducted by aliens, travels back in time, and is brutalized by one of their enemies, a demonic agent of the evil, extra-dimensional Outer Church.
The first arc of the volume is almost entirely devoted to Jack's development as a character. Although still angry and self-centered, the seeds of self-realization and true compassion have been planted within him. In the second arc, Morrison plays around with the rest of the cast--the ultra-cool assassin King Mob; the psychic witch Ragged Robin; the ex-cop (and female) Boy; and the Brazilian transvestite shaman Lord Fanny. Using time travel, the Invisibles are transported to the French Revolution, which Morrison subtly uses to show the dark side of rebellion.
The Invisibles is certainly Morrison's best work yet and this volume has all the reasons why: strong characterization, insane ideas, irresistible dialogue, and refreshing originality. Morrison takes his cues from no one--he leads the way.
My favourite Graphic Novel September 20, 2008
Ravi Naimpally (Toronto, ON, Canada)
The Invisibles is one of the best graphic novels I have read. It weaves bits of Joseph Campbell, conspiracy theories, and great action into a complex web that is really fun to read. I like Grant Morrison's non linear approach to story telling, his characters are great and he has certainly done his research into both popular and ancient mythology.
 Very, Very Bland July 11, 2006
Lewis Kennedy (California United States)
2 out of 34 found this review helpful
I'm not really a big of Grant Morrison's work. I find a lot of his work to be the kind of stuff I thought up and then decided does have enough depth to carry it in a story. With that said, Invisibles takes the cake when it comes to that. While it may be different, that doesn't mean it has any depth. If you're a fan of Morrison's, go do yourself a favor and read the Seven Soldiers trades or his Arkham Asylum stuff but stay away from the Invisibles.
Almost as good as it gets. June 11, 2006
The Preacher (PA, USA)
2 out of 9 found this review helpful
I just read the review bad mouthing this and wanted to cancel him out by giving this 5. It's a great book, one of the most imaginative comics of all time and it's easy to grasp and understand if you pay attention. Also, try and read more than 3 issues sometime, eh?
 Not my cup of reality-warping hallucinogenic tea. June 9, 2006
R. Hunter Gough (Albuquerque, NM United States)
15 out of 24 found this review helpful
Long ago, a friend who raved about "The Invisibles" loaned me this first book. I don't have very clear memories of it, but I remembered it as being very hard to read, and I remember not getting very far in it before I lost interest.
Recently, due specifically to the influence of Warren Ellis's awesome series "Planetary", I've gotten interested in comics again, and decided to give "The Invisibles" a second try. I got a little further this time, but still didn't even make it past the first volume.
The story seems promising; "Big Brother is Watching, So Make Yourself Invisible". The eponymous team are a gang of reality-bending Crowley-style sorcerors, fighting the mundane system of everyday life, and the sinister otherworldly monsters who control the mundane system of everyday life. The execution, however, is less than ideal. MOST of the pages are very jarringly non-sequential; on one page, the characters will be in a park, listening in on a conversation, and then on the next page, where you expect to find a continuation of the conversation they were listening to, they'll suddenly be walking along a riverbank, in the middle of their own completely different and unrelated conversation. On almost every single page I had to turn back, and check the page numbering to make sure I hadn't accidentally skipped something or pages hadn't fallen out of the book; if it weren't for the sequential page numbering, I would have assumed I was reading a bad printing. This could be a clever technique if used sparingly; in a comic book about "hacking reality", throwing in a sudden and unexpected "jump cut" between two pages can contribute greatly to the reader's immersion in the "reality hacking", but when it's done on every other page it loses that hook and just feels sloppy, like the author and artist didn't know how to structure a comic.
One of the "page cuts" jumps from the beginnings of a fairly realistic fight scene to a super-bright, psychedelic scene in which a character is tripping out and talking to the ghost of John Lennon, which looks like a completely different comic, has completely different pacing and artwork, and is FILLED with meaningless text, which brings us to my next problem with "The Invisibles": there's WAY too much meaningless text. If you want to present a radical, reality-altering concept in your comic, that's great; try to do it with action as much as possible and with as few words as possible -- this is a visual medium, after all. If you need to throw in a few wordy bits, that's OK too ("Planetary", again, does a perfect job of this). If, however, you are filling ENTIRE PAGES with text so small that you have to go below standard comic font size and it becomes illegible, then you might want to re-think your medium and perhaps just write a book, or a really wordy animation, instead. It was after the third ENTIRE page of nothing but hard-to-read, handwritten, meaningless text that I gave up on "The Invisibles". And by "meaningless" I don't mean "fluff dialogue that pertains to the action" or "cryptic dialogue that might make sense later", I mean actually meaningless, gigantic word-bubbles of insane characters singing entire songs and babbling incoherently about things that have nothing to do with the plot, or meaningless stream of consciousness droning from characters who are tripping. All of this text feels like nothing but filler, and coupled with the jarring transitions between pages it makes "The Invisibles" look like VERY amateur work.
One last niggling detail is that I couldn't really identify with any of the characters. The main character, a teenage boy named "Dane", is basically a carbon-copy of Alex from "A Clockwork Orange", but without the interest in Beethoven. He wanders around London with his monosyllable-named "droogs", indiscriminately stealing cars, smashing windows, beating people up, and blowing up buildings. It's suggested that he's very smart, but this doesn't make him any more likeable. The "hook" is that he "sees dead people", which might've been clever when this series was first printed, but after "The 6th Sense", "Bleach", and a dozen other stories with "I see dead people" protagonists, it just seems cliched.
I really wanted to get the same sort of "reality warping" experience out of "The Invisibles" that some of my friends have, but I've seen it done better a dozen times before, and the whole execution just seems amateur. When I stopped reading it, I was hungry for some REAL reality warping, so I sat down and read some stories out of the collected fictions of Jorge Luis Borges and felt MUCH better. I suggest you skip "The Invisibles" and do the same.
Addendum: The friend who last loaned it to me told me that the first two story arcs were, indeed, horrible, but that it got significantly better after them. I tried reading it again, skipping over those first two story arcs and starting from the third, and it was indeed a much better read, and nothing was lost in having not read that first part. So, I'm upgrading my review to "a fun read overall, but not something I'd be interested in owning".
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