No, not Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. This one. I understand that it can get confusing. Certainly, the reviewers on Amazon seem confused.

Why yes, I do love this picture.

The Invisible Man is often overlooked, and he’s not only important culturally, but has morphed in some pretty cool ways (link). So I thought I’d shine a light on him, so to speak, and share some information, and some resources, about this unusual monster. Note, if you’re going to be making a homemade Halloween costume for an 8 year old boy who loves monsters, as I am, this is an easy one.

Every single one of the items pictured below is related in some way to the Invisible Man. Want to find out how?

What with Teen Read Week’s theme this year of “Seek the Unseen” it seems like the perfect time to give some visibility to a human monster often lost in the crowd: the Invisible Man. While the Invisible Man doesn’t have the iconic status of vampires, zombies, man-made creatures, and werewolves, he has, in his invisible way, insinuated himself into popular culture.

As with Frankenstein, The Phantom of the Opera, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde, the Invisible Man has literary origins, first appearing in a novella of the same name by the famed H.G. Wells. And as with Frankenstein and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Invisible Man is a cautionary tale about the perils of pride, in taking science just a step too far in the direction of a nightmare. In the novel, Griffin, a scientist who has discovered the secret of invisibility, and tested it on himself, arrives in a small town hoping to complete experiments that will allow him to reverse the process. Obsessed and ambitious even at the beginning, he becomes more and more detached from humanity and willing to commit destructive and amoral acts, until finally he is killed and becomes visible again. The novella was made into a Universal horror film in the 1930s, and since then he has been represented in a number of different ways: as an increasingly psychopathic and violent monster(in the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, for instance); as a redemptive figure unrelated to the Wells novel except for possessing the power of invisibility(such as the one in the Sci-Fi channel series The Invisible Man); and as an entertaining member of ensemble-related monster movies such as Mad Monster Party and Hotel Transylvania. Queen even introduced him into the world of music with their song “The Invisible Man”. Yet, while he continues to resurface, it doesn’t seem to me that he is especially noticeable (par for the course, I suppose). Many of the tropes of invisibility that appear throughout popular culture (including Harry Potter’s Cloak of Invisibility) can be attributed to The Invisible Man, though, including tween and teen novels (a few are pictured above)  and media (Out of Sight, Out of Mind is a favorite Buffy episode of mine)  I will take a moment to note that the original movie has really awesome special effects– here’s a link— so this is also an opportunity to pull out books on that topic!  As you prepare to seek the unknown for Teen Reed Week you might consider him, and ask teens to consider this: if you had the power of invisibility, what would you do? Where would you go? What kind of person would you want to be?