Annotations [And We're All Policeman]


Grant has a short story called "I'm a Policeman" in a new British prose anthology called "Disco 2000". (It's only just come out over here. The ISBN is 0-340-70771-2) The story is very similar to this one, except that it is set on December 31, 1999. The main character is refered to by the crowd as "Starorzewski", so it's safe to assume that it is another version of King Mob/Gideon Stargrave. [DM]

o [page 1] [panel 2] "Bovine Spongiform Encephalitis": better known as Mad Cow disease. [BSI]

o [page 2] "For Lou and for Shelly": DC editors Lou Stathis and Shelly Roeberg. Lou Stathis died of brain cancer on May 4, 1997. Shelly currently edits The Invisibles. [BSI/JB]

o [page 3] [panel 5] "By 2012 there will be no more information. All we'll have is garbage in the system! Information is a finite resource and we are quite simply breaking it down too rapidly.": 2012 is of course the date set for the end of the world. Information also connects to entropy. There are analogous laws to the laws of thermodynamics for information, where signals decay to noise over time. So in the same way that entropy increases, so does noise, and when it reaches it's maximum and there's no information left... well, it's the end of the word as we know it. But I feel fine. [JBU]

o [page 4] [panel 1] Blair is Britain's present Prime Minister. [JBU] [panel 4] Albert Einstein. According to some people, his wife was one of the greatest physicists the world has ever seen. [JBU]

o [page 5] [panel 4] The egg image appears (in somewhat different form) in the last chapter of Moorcock's 'The Alchemist's Question', the last (that I know of) Cornelius novel. [BSI] "Gaze upon my works, ye mighty, and despair!" is a (slight mis)quote from Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem "Ozymandias". Invisibles readers will be familar with Shelley and his friend Lord Byron from 1.05. For those who'd like to read the whole poem, it's online at http://library.utoronto.ca/www/utel/rp/poems/shelley2b.html. [FH]

o [page 7] [panel 2] The chap in the 'Dirty Dozen' shirt is Keith Flint from the Prodigy. [JBU] [panel 3] The giant woman-thing hovering over Gideon bears more than a passing resemblance to Spice Girl Geri Haliwell... right down to the Union Jack dress that she wore at some award show recently. So it's quite likely it's her name that is blacked out in the first two instances in this panel's caption. I have no clue on the third deletion, but "Mama" was a single off the first Spice Girls album. [CE] [panel 4] "Chronos, the Titan." In Greek mythology, the Titans were the gods that existed before the "current" gods (Zeus, Hera, etc.). Chronos (or Cronos, or Cronus) was the father of Zeus; Chronos ate his children to prevent their overthrowing him, but his wife Rhea saved Zeus from this fate, after which Zeus led a revolt against the Titans. "Chronos" of course means "time", which destroys all things. See also http://www.desy.de/gna/interpedia/greek_myth/titan.html#Cronus [FH].

o [page 8] [panel 1] The Gray alien reappears. [BSI]