Tools of the "En-Eh-Mee:" Grant Morrison's Utopia and the Means to End There

Abstract

<p>This thesis analyzes the impact of the Dark Age of comics on Grant Morrison’s comic book series The Invisibles, specifically arguing that the traditional superhero figure enacts a certain narrative violence on the characters and text itself, both through direct violence and in the limiting of potential narratives. The first chapter establishes The Invisibles’ contemporary comic tropes, establishing Dark Age superheroes as an exceptionalist figures who use extreme violence to separate themselves from a perceived corrupt society. As such, this thesis moves from a psychoanalytic approach to heroism towards a schizoanalytic approach found in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, demonstrating how similar cycles of pathologization found in their critique of psychoanalysis also apply to The Invisibles’ attempt to innoculate itself against its own sensationalized violence. In doing so, the series eventually purges itself of the hero’s underlying ideological violences and attempts to actualize a Morrison’s own notions of utopia through the medium of comics, valuing multiplicities and the production of narratives to inform the experience of reality over a limitation of narratives based on violent conflict.</p>