The Invisibles

The Invisibles (1994-2000) is a comic book series by Grant Morrison and various artists, following a group of occult terrorists who must overthrow a secret global conspiracy before the world ends in 2012.

Volume 1, issue #17, Gideon Stargrave in Entropy in the U.K., Part 1: Dandy

Sir Miles Delacourt: By god, but you're the most pathetic, ludicrous, ugly creature I've ever seen.

Lord Fanny: You really must work on those pick-up lines if you want to score, darling.

---

Gideon Stargrave: And did you see that old goat Reagan describing me as "a false Christ" in his emergency broadcast last night? I'm really peeved.

Genevieve Stargrave: Never mind, sweetheart. We've still got each other.

Gideon Stargrave: Mmm, we'll always have incest.

Narrator: And as Genevieve and Gideon Stargrave press tongue to tongue, it must be kept in mind that incest has long been the sacred prerogative of royalties and divinities.

Volume 1, issue #18, Gideon Stargrave in Entropy in the U.K., Part 2: Messiah

Gideon Stargrave: All things considered, there's absolutely no escape from this hellish situation. I'm prepared to take the coward's way out if you are. It's reincarnation or nothing.

Doctor Gupta: What? But what about my bloody karma, you crazy colonial oppressive bastard? What if I'm reborn as a white man?

Volume 1, issue #19, Gideon Stargrave in Entropy in the U.K., Part 3: Assassin

Sir Miles Delacourt: Have you ever wondered why we talk of "spelling"? There is a spell word implanted in the brain of every English-speaking child, the root mantra of restriction, the secret name of a mighty hidden demon: "eybeesee-dee-ee-eff-geeaitcheye-jai-kayell-emenn-ohpeequeue-are-ess-tee-youveedouble-you-ex-wyezed". That name and all the names it generates were designed to set limits upon humanity's ability to express abstract thought. What you see depends entirely upon the words you have to describe what you see. Nothing exists unless we say it.

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Boy: Maybe I'm being just a little superstitious, but the idea of riding around in a hearse is kinda less than thrilling, you know?

Jim Crow: We all gonna ride in one someday, sister. Might as well get comfortable.

Volume 1, issue #20, How I Became Invisible

Boy: That's the thing about conspiracy nuts; you start off laughing at them and then a strange thing happens... you wind up seeing them in the mirror.

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Boy: The beast is still out there. I can't smell it too well but I can hear its breathing now and I can see its tracks. Making me disappear was its big mistake. See, I'm invisible now. I leave no traces, no footprints. I'm invisible now. I'm a hunter with nothing left to lose. And that bastard, that smug and self-satisfied beast, can't see me coming.

Volume 1, issue #24, Good-Bye Baby Rabbits

Barbelith: I am not the god of your fathers. I am the hidden stone and break all hearts. Break open your own heart. Come from below. Rise unto the heights, descend again with knowledge. You must return below.

Dane "Jack Frost" MacGowan: Is that you, Jesus? Fucking hell, man.

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Mister Six: This has been a bastard of a day, don't you think? What about the room? Sir Miles?

King Mob: I dealt with him. I tore his aura away. He won't be able to survive long without it. Every etheric parasite from here to the Abominable Plateau of Leng should be sniffing him out by now.

Mister Six: You're twitchy.

Volume 1, issue #25, And Half a Dozen of the Other

Jack Flint: It's like Flann O'Brien. That's what it reminds me of. Flann O'Brien. Know what I mean?

George Harper: Haven't a clue, guv'nor. I knew an IRA bloke called O'Brien once. He'd no left arm and one night, when he was pissed as a fart, he actually let me hear the sound of one hand clapping. Pity I had to shoot him.

Jack Flint: Christ, but you're an uneducated bastard! Flann O'Brien only wrote "The Third Policeman", which is one of the greatest books in the English language. You'd like it, George. It's a comedy, like your bloody haircut.

Volume 2, issue #1, Black Science, Part 1: Bangin'

Narrator: It's the end of the word as we know it.

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Billy-Bob: Which one of you sick fucks thought that was funny? Goddamn fucking she-male standing there, looking at me like I'm the faggot.

Mason Lang: Hey, come on. It's too early in the morning for this, and we're leaving anyway. Why don't I buy you and your friends a drink?

Billy-Bob: Why don't you just shut the fuck up, Yankee? I'll get to you just as soon as I get done with the she-male and the bald cock-sucker here.

King Mob: Well, is that you, John Wayne? Is this me?

Billy-Bob: Fuck you trynna-- *ikk*

(King Mob has grabbed hold of Billy-Bob's testicles)

King Mob: I'm telling you that you're in the wrong film, fatboy. You're not in the cowboy film you thought you were in. This is a different kind of movie. And you're in the scene where the redneck shitkicker picks on the stranger in town, only it turns out to be big Arnie or a gang of vampires. I'll bet you've seen that a million times, cowboy.

Billy-Bob: Sure.

King Mob: So here's the deal: you've just made the mistake of your life but you can wash away your sins by apologizing to the lady. Otherwise I squeeze, you pop and guess who's singing castrato in church on Sunday?

Billy-Bob: I... ah... I called you a faggot and... ah... well, I'm sorry. Fuck.

Lord Fanny: That's all right, darling. I am a faggot. And you do have a lovely dick.

Volume 2, issue #2, Black Science, Part 2: Kickin'

Mason Lang: "I am become death. The shatterer of worlds." That's what Oppenheimer said when the first atom bomb was detonated out there somewhere. Twenty miles away from ground zero, a girl called Georgia Green, blind all her life, saw a brief light. The Rio Grande looks like chocolate flowing. How did that happen?

King Mob: It's just the drugs, Mason.

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King Mob: Elephant head. Elephant head. I WORSHIP A GOD WITH AN ELEPHANT HEAD!

Volume 2, issue #3, Black Science, Part 3: Sorted

Demon: Your mother fucks Hitler in Hell.

Dane "Jack Frost" MacGowan: Yeah? My mother'd fuck Hitler in fucking Harrogate if she thought she'd get a McDonald's Happy Meal and a packet of fags out of it.

Volume 2, issue #4

Colonel Friday: Hear this: When our masters' work is done, every living thing will have the status of a machine. There will be no creativity, only productivity. Instead of love there will be fear and distrust, instead of surrender there will be submission. We will replace contact with isolation, and joy with shame. Hope will cease to exist as a concept. We will cover the earth with steel and with concrete, this planet will be a factory farm producing morons to fuel and mantain the factory engines and feed our masters. There will be an electronic policeman in every head. Your children will be born in chains, live only to serve and die in anguish and ignorance. Look around you, the process is already in its final stages. And you, like everyone else, will take your place on the production line.

Volume 2, issue #7, The Sound of the Atom Splitting

Dane "Jack Frost" MacGowan: You're all right, Fanny. For a bloke in a dress and that. You're all right.

Lord Fanny: So some "fucking poofs" are all right now? It's a start.

Dane "Jack Frost" MacGowan: I said they're all right, man! I'm a fucking space cadet, all right? I said they're all right. I don't wanna be one.

Lord Fanny: Who's asking you to be one? Jack, I like you, but you're not my type.

Dane "Jack Frost" MacGowan: ...so what's the matter with me?

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King Mob: Oi, Buddha!

(He shoots the head off a Buddha statue)

King Mob: Meditate on that.

Volume 2, issue #14, Only Lovers Left Alive

Sir Miles Delacourt: Middle-class parents are terrified of non-existant child killers; soon we'll have them so terrified they'll gladly allow us to electronically tag all newborn infants. We are engineering sick, obese, passive consumers. Even the video games they obsessvely play contain demoralising subliminals. A weak-willed child is easy to manipulate using product hypnosis. Look at their clothing, for instance. The new breed are simply mobile hoardings, advertising the multi-national corporations which control their minds.

Colonel Friday: Children are the hope of the future, Sir Miles. Our future.

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Colonel Friday: You wonder why the children of America are so obsessed with death? You wonder why rock groups that look like corpses and zombie comic-book heroes are so goddamn popular here? It's just the same way your Victorians loved their tombs and seances and murders. The American Empire is dead and does not know it. Like your empire before it, it's only aware of it in its sleep.

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Lord Fanny: Put the drinks over there, Jack! His name's Bleuurwah something. He's not only gorgeous, darling... he's an idiot. My tits are bigger than his IQ.

Volume 2, issue #19, Black Science II, Part 3: Pavlov's Dogs

The Blind Chessman: Here, on one side, the dreadful guardians of the black iron prison, condensing their macro-geometry into these protomaterial jigsaw forms; the great King-Archons of this eon. The custodians of your reality. "The Forgotten Ones". And here, the sons of light, mustered in radiant battalions. I don't suppose you know what "manichaean" means yet?

Dane "Jack Frost" MacGowan: Yeah, it's somebody from Manchester. Are you trying to hypnotise me, ey?

Volume 2, issue #20, Black Science II, Part 4: Schrodinger's Cats

Lord Fanny: When you shut your eyes, afraid to see yourself as you truly are... That is when you see only darkness.

Volume 2, issue #22, The Tower

Mason Lang: I remember looking at the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia when I was a little kid. That's what I love about illusions; they're right up there in front of you but somehow you don't see them... until suddenly you do... and I saw that I lived in a world where the symbol was more important than the reality. Where the menu was supposed to taste better than the meal. They're bombing planet Hollywood... those terrorists know exactly where the power lies. None of it's real. Kennedy was a good man. Nixon was a bad man. Is that true or is that just what we've been told is true? Half of the stars in Hollywood are gay pretending to be straight... (Walt Disney) was a shit. The moon landings happened in a studio. The America I thought I lived in was a trick; I'd only ever really seen it on TV, in comic books and movies... especially movies. The Rosicrucians who built this country wouldn't know where they were if you brought them here, would they? Not until you showed them Independence Day. That night when I pissed down over Manhattan, I saw time. I saw time itself... America has been in a declared state of national emergency since March 9th, 1933, giving the president powers to suspend freedom of speech and take control away from all communications media at any time. Who cares? Bruce Willis is here to save us all. The more I looked, the less real America became. And the less real it became, the stronger it got. Planet Hollywood.

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Mason Lang: One of their agents said to me... "however things turn out, you'll be working for us." That's what I was hoping he'd say. When they discover that the liquid processors in the decoy time suit work, they'll have to call me. I'll have to give them all my technology. They haven't quite figured out how to fight the wars of the 21st century yet... too bad. My homeopathic processors will be standard military issue by 2005. I've already installed trapdoor access into all of those systems. By 2012 I'll have control of the entire western military industrial complex.

Volume 3, issue #12, Satanstorm, Part 1: Common People

Purves: All right then, no farting about: you need a hardcore fortune teller. I can see skeletons at the elbows of half the OAPs in Safeways. "Blow your pension on crack and whores!" I tell 'em, but they never listen. Dead in days... What do I get, Jack?

Jack Flint: Friends call me Jack, and I don't see any of them in here, Purves. People like you get to call me Detective Inspector Flint. So, are we talking business or are you just gonna block my view of Candice's tits?

Purves: I'll tell you your fortune... you haven't got one. In your drink. Ten minutes ago. Barman got an offer, Detective Inspector Flint. We didn't tell him what the stuff was.

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Mister Six: We lied. We are not at war. There is no enemy. This is a rescue operation.

Volume 3, issue #11, Satanstorm, Part 2: Cold Britannia

Mister Six: Police. Stay perfectly still while I read your minds.

Volume 3, issue #10, Satanstorm, Part 3: The 'It' Girls

Mister Six: You slept with King Mob just like that? How very modern.

Helga: He read me extracts from a medical journal describing the progress of a staphylococcus aureus infection. And then he pleasured me with a potato.

Mister Six: [dubiously] How extraordinary.

Helga: It was wonderful.

Mister Six: What sort of potato was it?

Helga: Ayrshire Blue.

Volume 3, issue #09, Satanstorm, Part 4: Digging Up Beryl

Sir Patrick Crowley: The press has enough on you, Miles, to turn you into a bigger public laughing stock than David Icke and Monica Lewinsky on a bicycle made for two!

Sir Miles Delacourt: Really? You, Sir Patrick, are like an ant perched on the edge of a teacup, perched on the rim of a volcano; you have no concept...

Sir Patrick Crowley: ...Of what you're bloody well talking about? Dead right! But I do know this: your masters have washed their hands of you. As for your bloody pet monster, we'll have that put to sleep by a qualified veterinary surgeon.

Volume 3, issue #08, Karmageddon, Part 1: Tantrika

Marquis de Sade: Regard! A whole ballroom devoted to the arts of farting and shitting! I find my humor is particularly sustained by the sight of others at their most bestial.

Lady Edith Manning: I once lived with six cats and an Irish wolfhound, monsieur. Public farting and shitting do not constitute a radical confrontation with the psyche to me.

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(A conversation by e-mail)

King Mob: May in Varanasi. 25° and wet. It's like the 6th circle of the inferno here, Edith - where they flail the arses off the howling heretics and the men who fuck marine life etc. NATO's stomping on the Balkans while India and Pakistan threaten one another with nukes. "Dead From the Waist Down" on MTV. The humidity's making me horny and mad. I miss Robin. In his new book, Ken Wilbur calls is "skin hunger". I feel like I'm building up a charge. Monsoon's on its way.

Lady Edith Manning: Dearest Gideon - I shan't succumb to your steamy prose. You've had me once and my yawns were heard throughout eternity.

Volume 3, issue #07, Karmageddon, Part 2: Type Ω

(On a video showing Sir Miles tied to a chair while a man wearing only a judge's wig, a thong and suspenders yells "GUILTY!")

Helga: We sent a copy to his wife and one to his daughter in Barcelona, and one to Crimewatch UK. I told them, "KOMBAT 666 WILL RELEASE THE HOSTAGE IN EXCHANGE FOR A SIGNED PHOTOGRAPH OF JESUS." Who knows?

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The King in Yellow: This was a road to the otherworld in old times when our organisation was introduced. Two hundred million years ago, in the triassic period, the salt pans stretch in every direction. We still meet here. Those who search for us become us. Here, in the bowels of the city, here in the cellars and in the subways. Have you made your decision?

Mister Six: For all I know you could be asking me to betray everything and everyone I ever cared about for the sake of... what, exactly? Still... you know me. I'll try anything twice. Show me these bowels of yours.

Volume 3, issue #05, Karmageddon, Part 4: Smile

Jack: These fuckers are about to go on a fucking time-joyride, man! ...You all right about hearing this? It makes your skull vibrate and your nose bleed.

Jolly Roger: Fuck you. Sounds just like one of my orgasms.

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King Mob: Every eleven years the sun floods the solar system with radiation. The storms have been getting worse all this century. The last storm of the century started a week ago. Know what they call it? Cycle 23. Here comes the summer.

Volume 3, issue #04, The Invisible Kingdom, Part 1: Planet Stepford

Rossiter: Latest on the eclipse: it's in the tenth house, which is bad for government and entrenched power structures.

Sir Miles Delacourt: Are you suggesting that we do not proceed?

Rossiter: Of course not. We're the new power, come to replace the old. Cameras in the head, children with microchips, spin doctors rewriting reality as it happens. That's why I voted for Tony Blair.

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Jack: Elfayed said I was an avatar of Horus, the "lord of force and fire." I told him to fuck off.

Fanny: Good for you, Jack. I never saw you as the messiah type. Jesus had size 8 feet and never swore, darling.

Jack: I'd make a great messiah, me. I'd give all the kids free sweets and everybody the week off. Horus is a kid, right? He comes on all fucking attitude, but all he wants to do is play in the end.

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King Mob: An unbroken chain of bloody mayhem since the 1920s. Invisiblism, the Club des Invisibles, the Unseen Faculty, the I.T., the I.T.O.... Us. This is it. A spell as long as the century, with Edith at the tail and us at the head end. I thought I'd save my official retirement from active farting about until 2000, but just in case we all get taken away in a flying saucer on Wednesday... I've been in the best band in the world. That's what it feels like. Honestly, all the mad days and nights we've been together. Magic in hotel rooms. Here's to the blank badge. And to everything around it that makes it seem blank. No more then. No more now. To chaos.

Volume 3, issue #03, The Invisible Kingdom, Part 2: Goodbye Rag

Jack: I'm glad I got into all this. I'm staying even if you go. We can do it without money just as easy now. We can make the world a better place for everybody. Without the guns.

King Mob: Yeah. I knew you'd be the one to figure out how to do that, Jack. D'you think we can stop bastards like us telling everybody how to live their lives - without killing them?

Jack: You just gotta make friends with 'em. Make friends with them until they beg for mercy.

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Jack: You can't go back, to what you were, can you? I wouldn't know who the fuck he was. He'd think I was a fucking prick... Gods, ey?

Fuckers don't even know I'm coming.

Volume 3, issue #01, Glitterdammerung!

King Mob: Nice and smooth.

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Unnamed Drag Queen: What do people do when they know they're on camera? They ACT! That's why the world's turning into a science fiction movie. Surveillance makes us all into stars. The world's a set and the cameras are everywhere as Aleister Crowley wrote in Liber AL Chapter One!! As confirmed by the Kabbalah! 'Every number is infinite, there is no difference...'

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King Mob: Fanny. They'll never kill you, baby. You're too enormous to die.

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Dane "Jack Frost" MacGowan: Reynard and me would argue all the time in this little Indian restaurant they had in San Francisco. There was a picture of Bill Clinton on the wall. There's no difference between fate and free will. Here I am; put here, come here. No difference. Same thing. Nothing ends that isn't something else starting. So which side are you on? Do you know yet? Anyhow. I've said my bit and it's your go now... so while you're thinking about it, think about this... my mate Elfayed told me something when I was little and wanking about twenty times a day: "We made gods and jailers because we felt small and alone", he said. "We let them try us and judge us and, like lambs to the slaughter, we allowed ourselves to be... sentenced. See! Now! Our sentence is up".

Invisibles Special: And We're All Policemen Now

Girl: Gideon! In your song "Aggression as a Well-Integrated Part of Primate Social Relationships", what did you mean by "sex versus non-sex versus parasite"?

King Mob: I was taking the piss, love.

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TV Voiceover: Third world children are plentiful. Fossil fuels are scarce. We need to burn something.