What's the highfalutin word for "divination by comic books"..?
I recently (OK, OK: Sunday, 4 October) reclaimed my complete run of Grant Morrison's comic book for DC's Vertigo imprint, The Invisibles, from a mostly non-comic book-reading friend I'd loaned them to back in 2007; as he'd not read more than the first four issues of Vol. 1, despite my occasional urgings to do so, I finally asked for them back before they scattered to the four winds. (Pity, that, as so much of it would've pushed his little red button marked "YES!!!" Still, he has a wife who would very likely have forcefully disapproved of them had she ever looked at or read certain issues, and three young children to worry about, so they weren't exactly something that he could read with impunity around the family domicile.)
In retrospect, it's rather odd that I bought every issue of The Invisibles off the rack -- no scrounging through back issue bins for this series -- just at a time when I was breaking my Marvel Zombie (TM) conditioning thanks to the sheer, inept crapitude of Marvel's storylines at the time. Huh. I didn't even score complete runs of The Power of Shazam! (48 issues, including the DC One Million tie-in that was numbered in thousands, if memory serves), The Invaders (41 issues and an annual), the first series of Ms. Marvel (23 issues), The Savage She-Hulk (first series: 25 issues), Nova (first series: 25 issues), or even -- Maya help me -- Black Goliath (5 issues) off the rack; The Invisibles went through three volumes spanning over the course of six years (1994 - 2000), for a total of 59 issues. (IIRC, Morrison originally planned for the series to run for 64 issues, but apparently the title didn't sell well enough for DC to allow him to stick to his original scheme, which might just explain why things got so bat-shit crazy as Vol. 3 wound down; for extra-fun, Vol. 3's issues were published in reverse -- a trick that Marvel Comics would subsequently swipe for its Lost Generation mini-series wherein Roger Stern and John Byrne retconned several decades' worth of backstory into the Marvel Universe, to shore up/explain away the geriatric nature of their mainline characters -- from issue #12 to issue #1.) Buying every single issue of such a run as it appeared is a pretty good achievement for a collector, especially considering how screwed up my life was back then.
I've been re-reading the series; I started by picking through Vol. 1, but, let's face it, even I knew, deep down, that I would in fact end up re-reading Every. Single. Issue. (In fact, I have to say that The Invisibles actually benefits from a non-linear, out-of-order re-reading; you're more apt to catch the little bits that Morrison and his various artists threw in than you are on a straight read-through.) I've just cracked Vol. 2 today (this is the one where Brian Bolland started drawing the covers), and I did a double-take upon re-reading Ragged Robin's "origin," in Vol. 2, No. 6 (July 1997: "The Girl Most Likely To"). To be more accurate, this was a double-take that was due to seeming synchronicity with "current events," rather than one prompted by fresh insight.
For there, on p. 10, panel 2, the newscast that Robin's listening to as she rockets across the Golden Gate Bridge on her Akira-esque motorcycle makes reference to "the flu of 2010."
Flu. Swine flu? The H1N1 virus that inspires so many news stories, and the vaccine against which inspires so much ludicrous, unwonted paranoia (hi, boss!)?
As Keanu Reeves might say: "Whoa."
The captions in full, for comic book nerds and/or conspirologists are as follows:
"'It's no worse than the flu of 2010,' say the experts, but doomsayer Doctor Clem Kendred claims that the colony of microscopic robots which escaped from a laboratory in Singapore could be self-replicating plague-machines poised to destroy the world!
"'The rogue nanos are attacking matter itself at the subatomic level,' claims Doctor K. 'That's bad news in any language!'"
These nanobots are perhaps better known as the "grey goo" that Bill Joy of Sun Microsystems so famously rang alarm bells about in the April 2000 issue of Wired (he spelled it as "gray goo" in his article), and which trend-spotting popular author (and notorious climate change denier...) Michael Crichton sort-of mined for one of his best-sellers, 2002's Prey.
In retrospect, it's rather odd that I bought every issue of The Invisibles off the rack -- no scrounging through back issue bins for this series -- just at a time when I was breaking my Marvel Zombie (TM) conditioning thanks to the sheer, inept crapitude of Marvel's storylines at the time. Huh. I didn't even score complete runs of The Power of Shazam! (48 issues, including the DC One Million tie-in that was numbered in thousands, if memory serves), The Invaders (41 issues and an annual), the first series of Ms. Marvel (23 issues), The Savage She-Hulk (first series: 25 issues), Nova (first series: 25 issues), or even -- Maya help me -- Black Goliath (5 issues) off the rack; The Invisibles went through three volumes spanning over the course of six years (1994 - 2000), for a total of 59 issues. (IIRC, Morrison originally planned for the series to run for 64 issues, but apparently the title didn't sell well enough for DC to allow him to stick to his original scheme, which might just explain why things got so bat-shit crazy as Vol. 3 wound down; for extra-fun, Vol. 3's issues were published in reverse -- a trick that Marvel Comics would subsequently swipe for its Lost Generation mini-series wherein Roger Stern and John Byrne retconned several decades' worth of backstory into the Marvel Universe, to shore up/explain away the geriatric nature of their mainline characters -- from issue #12 to issue #1.) Buying every single issue of such a run as it appeared is a pretty good achievement for a collector, especially considering how screwed up my life was back then.
I've been re-reading the series; I started by picking through Vol. 1, but, let's face it, even I knew, deep down, that I would in fact end up re-reading Every. Single. Issue. (In fact, I have to say that The Invisibles actually benefits from a non-linear, out-of-order re-reading; you're more apt to catch the little bits that Morrison and his various artists threw in than you are on a straight read-through.) I've just cracked Vol. 2 today (this is the one where Brian Bolland started drawing the covers), and I did a double-take upon re-reading Ragged Robin's "origin," in Vol. 2, No. 6 (July 1997: "The Girl Most Likely To"). To be more accurate, this was a double-take that was due to seeming synchronicity with "current events," rather than one prompted by fresh insight.
For there, on p. 10, panel 2, the newscast that Robin's listening to as she rockets across the Golden Gate Bridge on her Akira-esque motorcycle makes reference to "the flu of 2010."
Flu. Swine flu? The H1N1 virus that inspires so many news stories, and the vaccine against which inspires so much ludicrous, unwonted paranoia (hi, boss!)?
As Keanu Reeves might say: "Whoa."
The captions in full, for comic book nerds and/or conspirologists are as follows:
"'It's no worse than the flu of 2010,' say the experts, but doomsayer Doctor Clem Kendred claims that the colony of microscopic robots which escaped from a laboratory in Singapore could be self-replicating plague-machines poised to destroy the world!
"'The rogue nanos are attacking matter itself at the subatomic level,' claims Doctor K. 'That's bad news in any language!'"
These nanobots are perhaps better known as the "grey goo" that Bill Joy of Sun Microsystems so famously rang alarm bells about in the April 2000 issue of Wired (he spelled it as "gray goo" in his article), and which trend-spotting popular author (and notorious climate change denier...) Michael Crichton sort-of mined for one of his best-sellers, 2002's Prey.