So, I used the long weekend to get in my Morrison reading. His Animal Man, the Flex Mentallo mini, The Invisibles, and The Filth. Mostly enjoyable, but I mainly want to talk about the series that, at least to me, had the most weak points: The Invisibles. I'll be pretty general so I don't think spoiler tags are needed.
To start with, The Invisibles is the only Morrison work I've read where I've actually had points where it just got, well, too Morrison for me. I normally can enjoy all his nonsense New Age pseudo-philosophy, but here it just gets to be a bit too much at points. It's not so much that it's New Age stuff but rather that at various points it becomes clear just how superficial and shallow some of his thinking is. Taking deeper spiritual concepts and cutting them down to almost unrecognizable stumps. Stuff that seems intended to be deep and subversive that feels more like a stoner contemplating a stain on the carpet. I can deal with all this to a degree but the wheels really come off a bit here.
The other thing that struck me about The Invisibles is that it is the best/worst example of the narrowness of his thinking on gender and sexuality I've read. Put simply, his experience with drag and drag culture seems to be his only insight and point of reference for queer culture and community. Pretty much any queer man he writes is a pretty cookie cutter queen and any queer characters outside of that tend to be flat and lifeless in regards to their queerness. This tends to make his stuff involving queerness pretty banal rather than subversive or otherwise interesting, at least when read by myself now. But even at that time queerness had expanded into other forms of subversion and nonconformity.
Tying the above back to The Invisibles, we have a queer character that is arguably one of the most, if not the most, memorable and interesting characters in the story. That's good. The thing is that, while there's not actually anything at all wrong with the character, Morrison doesn't really use her to explore much new ground outside of his drag comfort zone. I admit that some of this is my talking in 2015 instead of 1994 when he started writing the book and what might have seemed subversive in regards to gender and sexuality to the average person in the years 1994-2000 is pretty old hat to myself in the modern world. Related, I'm not really bothered by the use of language such as "tranny" and "shemale" in The Invisibles given the culture and time frame it comes from. That said, I am pretty bothered by Morrison's continued flippant use of them in the present day, but that's not really related to this older writing.
I guess what I'm saying is that I found a lot of the stuff in The Invisibles that was supposed to be thought provoking kind of dull.
