In giving us a look at the life of a normal man who is drawn into the superviolent world of heroes and comics as a whole, what Morrison and artist Steve Parkhouse are offering is a distinctive working-class-hero story, a type of narrative which only works within and from a British mindset. Each segment is a whole piece, a slice of true life which stands by itself as well as being a snapshot of a short moment in history. He hits all the parts of his life which mattered to him, and the storytelling takes great pains to sew together all those elements into an authentic and true life, even as that life is cut short.įor all the exploration of that linear/non-linear sequential arrangement of Bobby’s memories, what’s as interesting is how clearly defined each of those memories are by themselves. He thinks to being a child, being an adult, being a dad, being scared, being happy. He lives, he dies, and as he dies he remembers elements of his life in scattered – but carefully arranged, and actually fairly linear – form.
He ultimately signs up to become an armed guard, at which point he runs into one of the comic’s actual protagonists and is promptly shot through the face without much ceremony. It tells the story of a working class man called Bobby, who goes from a dreaming, nervous child to a war-scarred veteran of the Falklands, and then into a miserable domestic abuser and washout. The issue itself is one of those celebrated ones – it made our Top 100 Comics List, in fact – and it achieved that acclaim largely through it’s perceived non-linear storytelling. Even a writer as carefully manic as Morrison can’t be about dadaism and meditation all the time, and it’s with a comic like The Invisibles #12 that you see some of their working class roots grow out into narrative. And although it doesn’t come up particularly often in their comics works – particularly in something as ambitious as The Invisibles, which often feels like a life statement from a writer published ahead of time – that background does sometimes drag itself back up into the work. For all the drugs, surrealism, or chaos magic which are frequently invoked along with their name, Grant Morrison is a normal person who grew up in Scotland, has a family, and lives (to the best of my knowledge!) a normal life. Every so often, Grant Morrison reminds you they’re human.
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