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There are many similarities between Grant Morrison's The Invisibles and Daniel Handler's Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events. The strongest perhaps being their emphasis on personal morality - Invisibles is all about transformations and initiations and Morrison has said this is because a vast part of its message is that the only way to change the world is to change yourself into a better person.

The 'Snicketverse' is much the same. Giving an in-character interview, 'Lemony' was asked who had inspired him as a child. He answered the people who remained gentle and kind despite the wickedness of the world and that it was they who still inspired him although there seemed to be fewer about. The Events books are much about the possibility of being such a person, although after Book Eight, in which the orphans begin using Olaf's methods, it is more about the difficulty of remaining such a person in a world that tends towards cruelty, a world of slippery slopes.

One big difference between Handler and Morrison's works is that when they filmed Handler's, they paid him. Mark Millar has shown that you can take the first volume (that's the first three TPBs) of The Invisibles and cut it up to produce a storyboard of The Matrix. People who worked as editors, designers and in other aspects of the film's production have come forward and confirmed that they were given copies of The Invisibles to source.

In some interviews Morrison comes across as a touch bitter and angry about this. In others he comes across as delighted that his ideas have penetrated more deeply into our culture through the film than he could of got them under his own steam. I expect it depends on what mood he's in that day. But the shrewdest thing he's ever said on the matter was "I repackaged Gnostic Transcendentalism and sold it to a couple of thousand a month. They repackaged The Invisibles and sold it to millions."

So, what's this 'gnosticism' then, and what's it got to do with Lemony Snicket?

Depending on who you belive, Gnosticism was either an heretical cult that spun off from Early Christianity, or a belief that pre-dated Christianity and had some of its ideas borrowed by Paul when he was cobbling Christianity together.

The basic idea is that God did not create the universe, but rather it was done by a lesser power (often called 'the demiurge'). Sometimes that power is seen as evil and sometimes as incompetant, but the important thing is the lesser part - the world is an imperfect place because it was created by an imperfect mind.

Gnosticism works in Morrison texts from Animal Man to Invisibles and JLA by having 'our' world being the plaything of writers/the supercontext/imps from higher dimensions. In William Burroughs Gnosticism works by having our world be the product of an evil demiurge called 'language'. In Philip K. d**k, the Gnostic demiurge, which he calls VALIS in his fiction and 'the artefact' in his non-fiction, is not evil but imperfect and slowly working to turn this world into a perfect replica of God (This concept is also what the infoscroll that explodes was trying to say in Intimates #6). In The Matrix, the machines are the demiurge and our world the Matrix.

Now, what all those texts incite us to do is to try and find a way to 'trancend' the world the demiurge has created and perceive the 'real' world outside. To take the pill Morpheus offers and, as Zee puts it in Zatanna #1, "Find somewhere bigger to live".

A Series of Unfortunate Events is not like that.

In the Snicketverse we're inside an evil, imperfect, wicked universe - but there's no way out. It's gnostic, but it's not gnostic trancedendalist as there's no hope of trancendance.

There's no metaphysical project to A Series.
Instead it uses the gnostic framework to advance a purely literary and didactic project. Morrison, Burroughs and d**k would like us to escape this flawed universe. Daniel Handler would like to improve kids' reading skills.

In one interview Daniel Handler talked about the Snickett books outselling the books put out under his name becuase The Basic Eight and Watch Your Mouth were 'strange literary novels'.

However, the A Series... books deserve to be considered as pretty damn literary in effect themselves, certainly as much as those Philip Pullman kids' novels that people take so inexplicably seriously just because they draw on Blake and Milton (That's one of my pet hates - people thinking stuff is smart just because of what it references. Gaiman and Carey aren't brilliant because they draw on Blake and Milton - they're brilliant because they're Gaiman and Carey).

The Series books are a fairly equal mixture of the didactic and the parodic. They're constantly claiming to be teaching you something while at the same time making fun of the whole idea of teaching; Words are explained, but meaninglessly, incorrectly or pointlessly. Facts are presented as exhaustively researched, but keep taunting the reader with the fact that they are fiction.

What's happening is a complex double bluff. Through the figure of Snickett, Handler is not just making fun of the Victorian notions of 'improving' books, novels that are meant to teach you stuff and make you a better person. He is actually persuing a didactic effect through parodying the didactic. I've not had a chance to read The Basic Eight yet, but it sounds like he's playing the same game there too.

Some film critic I saw on BBC2 a while ago was talking about the difference between watching a classic Hitchcock style horror film, and watching the low-budget nasty horrors of the 70's and 80's. Watching a film Hitchcock directs, you're frightened...but you know you're in the hands of a master craftsman who is playing everything to perfection - so it's a comfortable kind of fear. Watching something like the original 'Texas Chainsaw Massacre' or the original 'Dawn of the Dead' however you feel less sure that you can trust the director...it feels like you're watching the work of a madman - you can't be sure what he's going to show you next.

The split between 'Snickett' and 'Handler' allows us to feel we're in the hands of a madman... 'Snickett' can't write - he breaks all sorts of 'rules' in any number of clumsy ways, accidentally destroys the tension he's building up by telling us how cliffhangers will be resolved before he's got there, goes off on crazy digressions, makes mistakes, gets words wrong, etc. But 'Snickett' is of course Handler's puppet...the reader is in the hands of a madman, but the madman is in the hands of a craftsman.

As Morrison tells Buddy when they meet in Animal Man, the seeming writer is just a demiurge.

What all this does is that while Snickett is teaching us bad lessons, Handler is teaching us all sorts of useful ones that we should bear in mind no what what book we're reading.

Kids who grow up reading these books are going to find it so much easier to identify the stylistic features of any bit of writing they're given to look at. Anybody who reads these books is going to find themselves thinking more deeply about the relationship between the reader, narrator and author when they pick up thier next non-Snickett book.

Journalists are often taught to keep the question "Why is this person lying to me?" in thier head at all times, but readers are better off asking, "How is this person lying to me?"

A Series shows that pulling a story apart and looking at the bits doesn't spoil the simple pleasure of following a story. Rather it shows that just being told a story is only part of the fun - the rest comes from investigating who's doing the telling, what their motives are and what it all really means.

MONKEY JOE SAYS: All stories are mysteries. All poems are codes.

Mmmm, I love those two books. Far too few people actually read 'Winnie the Pooh' and 'The House at Pooh Corner' then really should.

Like John, I've only read the first of the Snicket books, and I have also read the Tao of Pooh, which I really loved and came away with some very life changing ideas. Ironically enough I suppose I read it as an elective in my religious studies course at the Catholic high school I attended.

Anyway, as usual some very interesting concepts are brought up and I feel as though my understanding of a few different works is better understood. The first being Lucifer, as I now know exactly what Michael's demurgic power is and why it's important that Lucifer and Michael created creation rather than God. It's also very good to finally know what Gnostic means. For some reason I'm finding that my interactions on the Internet have oddly enough accounted for the periods of greatest growth in my life. My first year at DeviantART for example, my art progressed by leaps and bounds. My year and some odd months at Gaia has really helped me grow intellectually a great deal. Funny that when there's studies coming out saying computers are making kids dumb.

As an "author", I sometimes feel somewhat inadequate when reading such analysis as to my knowledge I don't seem to have any kind of subversive ideas or ulterior motives in my prose. I tend to write to simply elicit specific reactions at specific times to endear them to the characters. Perhaps it will come with time, or perhaps it's just not my thing. It's always fun to read and read about it though.

I'm loving this thread, Doreen. Good job.

If anyone is interested in a tabletop RPG that uses Gnosisism as it's base, I highly recommend Kult. Beware though, it makes the World of Darkness look like Sesame Street.

Thanks! I always feel such terror when I unleash one of my mammoth posts that I might have spent half the morning typing up something in which nobody's interested.

*sigh* I wish I had the sort of lifestyle where I could commit to a tabletop group. I really miss it.

MONKEY JOE SAYS : If 'Sesame Street' was in the WoD, it'd be called MUPPETS: The Counting.

Crikey. I thought the best I could achieve here was pimping the Snicket books a little and giving people new 'ways in' to a couple of VERTIGO series...never imagined it'd prompt anyone to go do the research and seriously consider thier own view of the universe. Thanks!

Excellent. So should I ever need to distract you for whatever reason I need just throw around some esoteric vocab and buy myself some time.


Look! That coriaceous opsimath is munging my cicisbeo's thos with saccades of his unctuous nates!

Well, technicaly that's post-structuralism, but y'know me - always moving the posts.