If I’m being honest, I’m still not a hundred percent on everything that is going on in the comic. Now, there’s much more to the whole thing than a simple battle between good and evil, and as the book goes on, things get way more complex. Every bad thing you can think of is on their side. They have their human servants, some of whom they alter and others who just want power and will serve them because they see no other alternative, such as the main villain of much of the comic, Sir Miles. An unaltered human in their presence dies of multiple cancers quickly. The Outer Church is run by Archons, demonic beings who exist to torment and control. The two universe touch and meld together, and that melding forms “our” universe. Another is the universe where The Invisible College resides, and that place is the opposite of the Outer Church. One is the Outer Church, and it is a place of ruthless order and casual atrocity. This is where things get complicated, but I’ll explain the cosmology of the whole thing before I go on- in the universe of The Invisibles, there are three universes.
On the other side, you have the Outer Church. She’s also probably the least fleshed out of the main characters. Boy is an ex-New York City cop… or so it seems. Ragged Robin is a telepath whose mysterious background plays into the whole thing later. Every scene she’s in is great in so many ways. She’s a trans woman, ex-prostitute bruja, and she’s just delightful. Lord Fanny is one of my favorite characters in anything ever.
King Mob is basically Morrison himself in the book as a supercool killer (more about this later) who, as the series progresses, begins to question his if all the killing is worth it. Jack Frost starts out as a stereotypical British hooligan in training, and while a lot about his attitude doesn’t change, he grows as a person in ways that he would never have if he hadn’t been discovered by the Invisibles, which is both good and bad. Six, Paddy Crowley, George Harper, and Jack Flint).
Much like in his Doom Patrol run, Morrison does some great character work with the main cast (although, if I’m being completely honest, some of the ancillary characters don’t get as much polishing, and I’m still confused about what’s going on with some of them, like all of the Division X guys who aren’t Mr. If you don’t know who every character is already, you’re going to be lost regardless. It’s like asking who have been Avengers or Justice Leaguers, or X-Men. Yeah, that’s a lot of names to throw at you without context, but you know, that’s how the cookie crumbles. Six, billionaire Mason Lang, Jim Crow, Helga, Takashi Satoh, Paddy Crowley, George Harper, and Jack Flint. Later in the book, the team is joined by other members of the Invisibles from around the globe, including Jolly Roger, Mr. He’s the POV character of the first storyline, but as the book goes on, it focuses on the other characters, giving us the origins of each of them. Oh, and Jack Frost is the newest reincarnation of the Buddha and is extremely powerful. These are all codenames they have chosen for themselves.
The team highlighted in the book consists of King Mob, Ragged Robin, Lord Fanny, Boy, and the newest member, Jack Frost. The Invisibles is the story of a cell of freedom fighters fighting against the entrenched power systems of the world, which are in league with dark beings from another universe. There are freedom fighters who lose sight of what they are fighting and why and agents of terrible order whose entire existence has been pain because of what they know and what they work toward. There’s sex, drugs, dancing, music, violence, aliens, magic, holographic universes, fetish clubs, government conspiracies, monsters, time travel. The Invisibles captures those feelings to a tee. We had no idea what was coming in the millennium. That utopia we thought we were heading towards was being built for us while we were trying to develop our own. However, we also knew that just behind all of that was this terrible yawning darkness, this secret world of government conspiracies and corporate power that was controlling everything. Like, we looked at the future with rose-colored glasses and could never foresee the down curve that was coming. The 90s were the last time that I can remember when there were so much hope and so much despair at the same time. It captures the zeitgeist of the time so well.
You’ll never read anything like it, and after you read it once, you’ll read it multiple times trying to understand the whole thing.įor my money, if someone asked me what the 90s were like, I would give them this comic. It’s insane at places in the best possible way. It’s beauty and chaos and darkness and pain and love and everything in between. It’s the comic that gave him his reputation for being a drugged-out shaman of the new world. It deals with a lot of stuff that he was into during the 90s and beyond. The Invisibles is Grant Morrison’s magnum opus.