It's been a long journey. Morrison has kept me vaguely interested enough that I haven't dropped him entirely, but I more than recognize why this series turned me off of him for months before I discovered WE3.

It didn't help that the final series is numbered in reverse and that I ended up reading the last three comics as the first three; I'd thought for a moment that Morrison's experimental plotting had reached some sort of frenzied climax where empty symbols had completely taken over any sense of meaning.

This error was a bit confusing at first, but had the added effect of revealing to me part of why Morrison comes off so flat to me. Morrison's story works like a drug trip; indeed, he utilizes several real-life trips as direct inspiration for this and others of his comics. The semi-random firings of neurons brought on by sleep and (hallucinogenic) drugs creates an overlay of sensory and symbolic experience which becomes the medium for our understanding.

The same might be said of any story, except that in Morrison's particular reading habits, he culls his symbols and sensory experiences not from the recognizeable or even the metaphorical, but from the theoretical or even the paranoid. His reality then has no focus, and exists in an interchangeable, dreamlike state; and like a dream, the thing which interconnects it is a continuous narrative.

One might ask if this has to be a problem, but in Morrison's case, he does not let it be a scattered dream but instead constantly tries to coalesce it into some holistic truth. It is unfortunate that one cannot build a holistic truth out of and unrelated scree. Mankind will always try to see patterns, even when they aren't there. We cannot understand or replicate the random, and never understand that the coincidence is something that must happen.

The real problem with the story, which sets Morrison apart from both Moore and Gaiman is that he's come to believe in his own bullshit. This story is too close to home for him, and beyond basing it on his own philosophies, he comes to believe that the whole work is a magic spell that is controlling his life. Now, maybe it is and maybe it isn't, but the end result is that Morrison stops working to make the thing coherent because he believes it is already.

Belief in the quality of a work or idea is the worst thing that can happen to an author. Without a constant doubt as to the quality or coherence of the message, the constant inflow of unchecked ideas turns into nothing more than a distracting white noise around the plot. The 2012 date for apocalypse quoted by Morrison comes from a completely innacurate source that actually doesn't match the Mayan calendar at all.

Morrison wraps it all up with something that looks but does not feel like a climax. Though he sets up all the evil empires, double agents, monomythic battle against evil, magic items, and monsters, he spends too much of his dialogue trying to explain this or that 5th-dimensional crystal to actually describe the cosmological conflict itself.

That being said, it's new and interesting enough, and did inspire me to think more about physical exploration and catharsis. The art gets better as the series closes up, though the latter books are a bit annoying sometimes in that they switch from one artist to the next for scenes.

I finished the thing. It taught me a lot of things not to do as a writer and helped me to recognize why some of Morrison's stories work so very well and why others are just empty and confused. I'll have to make sure that if I ever write my dream project, near and dear to my heart, that I have a very smart and very honest friend read it first and let me know if I should just keep the hubristic nonsense to myself. ( )

I picked up most of the Invisibles collections last year, but felt like it was losing focus towards the end. I put off buying this, the final installment, for months, and alas! the world ends not with a bang but a whimper.

I like Morrison's work in general, and I'm a big fan of the long form, such as Sandman, Promethea, or Cerebus; but the Invisibles doesn't so much end as merely stop.

Still, some folks love this, so I'm going to look into the Disinformation Guide to the Invisibles to see if I've missed something major.