Invisibles 1,8
From Barbelith
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Credits
Grant Morrison (Writer) Jill Thompson (Pencils) Dennis Cramer (Inks) Daniel Vozzo (Colors) Clem Robins (Letters) Julie Rottenberg (Asst. Editor) Stuart Moore (Editor)
The Invisibles created by Grant Morrison
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Summary
The spirits of King Mob and Boy are introducing the Marquis DeSade to the 20th Century at an S&M club. Meanwhile, Ragged Robin's spirit is confronting the Cyphermen at Rennes-Le-Chateau, where the head of John The Baptist is at rest. Their bodies are back at the Windmill, being defended by Lord Fanny and Jack Frost from the prunings of Orlando. Fanny finally disposes of Orlando by summoning Mictlantecuhtli, and the the spirits of Robin, King Mob and Boy return to their bodies. Jack says he is going to leave the group, while gun sights focus on the building....
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Characters
Marquis de Sade King Mob The Blind Chessman George Byron Percy Shelley Jack Frost Boy Orlando Ragged Robin Lord Fanny The Cyphermen
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Analysis
Our heroes confront their nemesis
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Annotations
The Title: "H.E.A.D." stands for "Hedonic Engineering And Development" [see page 16, panel 6] "Head" is also the title of the psychedelic movie the Monkees made when they tried to distance themselves from their TV series image. The screenplay was co-written by Jack Nicholson.
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PAGE 1
Panel 3 Timothy Leary was an "acid guru" who popularized LSD. He died in 1996. Leary gave many people acid, including some Hollywood stars. Kesey wrote "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest," which was made into the film starring Jack Nicholson. The money from the book financed the bus journey described in Tom Wolfe's 'The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test."
Available online: the Timothy Leary website and my interview with Leary, conducted in person six weeks before his death.
[also page 3, panel 3]: This is a reiteration of an argument that Timothy Leary and Charles Manson had in prison. Manson argued that Leary had shown the world the path to freedom and evolution (LSD), but had let everyone down by then refusing to lead us onto the path. Leary maintained that true freedom meant that, shown the means, people had to lead themselves onto the path, without assistance from leaders. Leary only wanted to open the gate; Manson thought he should have led us through it too. This ongoing debate (Leary and Manson were in neighboring solitary confinement cells for a while in the early 1970s) is recounted in Dr. Leary's book "NeuroPolitics."
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PAGE 3
Panel 1 "O brave new world that has such people in it." is from Shakespeare's "The Tempest." The line is spoken by the wizard Prospero's daughter Miranda. The title of Huxley's novel was a reference to this.
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PAGE 4
Panel 6 The first dialogue caption being spoken by the Head of John the Baptist is a lyric from a song by '80s cross-dressing new wave band Dead or Alive. In Wilson/Shea's "Illuminatus" trilogy, much of the plot revolves around "immanentizing the eschaton." "33 1/3, 45 and 78": the speeds to play vinyl albums, singles and old grammophon records.
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PAGE 5
Panels 1-3 The eschaton is the end of the world. This is an explicit reference to Terence McKenna's timewave/Eschaton idea.
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PAGE 6
Panels 1-2 "The Subterraneans" is a 1958 Jack Kerouac book. Anyone know anything about the film version? "Beat Girl": (From the back on the video box) BEAT GIRL (1960). Starring Gillian Hills, Christopher Lee, Oliver Reed, Nigel Green, David Farrar. Directed by Edward T. Greville. A film about a rebellious teen who becomes a stripper. The original playbill for the movie claimed "SEE Wild parties in back street 'SIN CELLARS'", "SEE Uninhibited striptease '...Melt! Melt! Melt!'", and the famous "My mother was a stripper... I want to be a stripper too!" which sums the film up rather nicely. Thin plot, but the party scenes are great.
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PAGE 10
Panel 1 These are the same words spoken by Fanny in issue Invisibles 1,5, page 16, panel 4.
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PAGE 11-12
Panel 3 What poem is this line from?
page 11, panel 5 and page 12, panel 1: Re: Pantisocracy, Southey and Coleridge. From Benet's: "Robert Southey (1774-1843), English romantic, one of the so-called Lake poets. Though a leader in his day, he is considered by modern critics to have been a mediocre talent... In his youth [1794], Southey joined Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) in the utopian scheme of pantisocracy and married Edith Fricker, whose sister married Coleridge. His early liberalism was superceded by a conservatism that was attacked in satire by Lord Byron." Coleridge was the leader of the English romantic movement, a friend of Wordsworth, and is the author of the poems "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and "Kubla Khan." He was also an opium addict.
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PAGE 13
Incidentally, Byron's daughter Ada Lovelace (who would've been three at the time of this story) was the lover of Charles Babbage, the inventor of the Difference Engine, a steam-driven computer designed in the mid-1800s. Ada helped create the machine's programming loops and some of the programmed subroutines. The Pentagon honored Ada by naming its classified internal Defense Department computer program "ADA." So through his daughter, Byron did eventually contribute to the creation of his pessimistic vision, via Pentagon computer control systems. For more info see "In the Age of Intelligent Machines" by Raymond Kurzweil.
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PAGE 14-15
Everything regarding Fanny's powers will be explained in issues 1.13-1.15.
page 14, panel : "These are old names from an earlier sun." This is a reference to Mayan mythology, which is explained (somewhat) in Invisibles 1,13, page 1.
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PAGE 16
Panel 6 "Hedonic Engineering and Devlopment"--"H.E.A.D."
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PAGE 17
Panel 2 How can you work the date out with the I-ching? According to I-ching, 35 means success. The development of everything appears fast, successful and simple. The communication is very important. Inside us there's a very powerful energy, something like a "primary nucleus." During our lives, this nucleus could become weak but there's the possibility for it to return strong and shine. Another set of explicit references to Terence McKenna's timewave/Eschaton idea.
Panel 3 Here's a site with info about DMT extraction and the DMT trip: http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~dunnat/dmt.htm
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PAGE 19
"When one reaches my age, one sees through the struggle. One sees it all for what it truly is. Just a game." This is an important statement that we'll come back repeatedly to later in the series: Invisibles 1,12.
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PAGE 20
What's the poem quoted here?
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PAGE 23
Panel 1 "...boys becoming girls, girls becoming boys WHO DO BOYS LIKE THEY'RE GIRLS." This is a quote from Blur's song "Girls and boys" (Parklife lp)
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PAGE 23
Panel 1 Note the "Et in Arcadia" graffitti behind the male prostitutes. Is this the heaven we've made? Is our contemporary world the conclusion of the project set in motion by the Templars, gone horribly wrong?
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PAGE 24
Panel 3 "I am to be no particular age, no particular sex. I am to be fluid, mercurial." These are all attributes of the alchemical magus Hermes Trismegistus. As the Egyptian Thoth, the Greek Hermes, Dante's Virgil, etc., Hermes is ageless. Hermes Trismegistus is also held in alchemical literature as the Androgynia, the holy hermaphrodite, the antitotalitarian god of boundary dissolution. As such, he/she is also frequently described in the Corpus Hermeticum as "fluid, mercurial," and was actually called Mercury by the Romans. Has de Sade been brought forward in time to participate in the creation of a new, postmodern Hermes Trismegistus?
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