I was digging through a box of old crap tonight looking for some old Tricky tapes I have. The album I was searching for in particular is called Pre-Millenium Tension, and while I don't know if it's a great album or not, at the time I sure liked it. I don't know why I was thinking about it as this was out of the blue, but like a craving for salt-and-vinegar potato chips or the sudden urge to grind your teeth together, I just had to have Tricky's broken rasp filling my head... so off I went through the boxes of old crap.
It's funny how we tie time periods together in neat little emotional aggregates by the details of peripheral data. Ask me what I was thinking or doing this time four or five years ago and I'll have to work the math of the question out backwards. Pop that damn Tricky tape in and I can tell you exactly where I was, what I was doing, and what everything felt like. I also remembered that, when I first came across that record and began listening to it obsessively, I was reading the books collected in this volume for the first time.
I'm not sure that I should be surprised at any of that, really, not with what INVISIBLES is all about. Picking up where Bloody Hell in America left off, King Mob and his Invisibles cell continue to fight and fuck their way across the land of the free and the home of the brave, edging towards an inevitable confrontation with the Apocalypse. The book starts with an interlude in the Invisible College where we learn not so much where, but when Robin comes from... the book, like the tape, brings it all back.
It was the summer of 1997. I was leaving a woman that wore some sort of vanilla perfume. I was listening to Tricky and Massive Attack, Clutch and Tindersticks. I was living on a futon mattress piled on a floor forever stained with cat piss. I ate cheap sushi and waited for student loan checks to clear. I read Grant Morrison's INVISIBLES.
Matt Fraction splits his time between motion graphics and design house MK12, writing comics, and reading comics. He is the author of the graphic novels The Annotated Mantooth and Last of the Independents, both available from AiT/Planet Lar. He can be found on the web at mattfraction.com. His wife is hot.
