In all of comics, there may be none that is more difficult to describe. Highly interpretive, it is a comic that cannot be fully understood on the first reading; multiple readings are required. The problem, if you can call it that, is that the story keeps changing every time you read it. Part arcano-anarco-manifesto, part neuro-linguistic thought bomb, and part drug-induced ramblings of a madman, this week we'll be taking a look at Grant Morrison's The Invisibles.

Let us start by speaking briefly about Grant Morrison. Grant Morrison is a freaking lunatic. Period, full stop, end of line. He's also a brilliant writer, a chaos mage, and a snappy dresser. He began writing comics in Britain in the mid-80s, working on various titles including Doctor WHO magazine and 2000A.D.

Following Crisis on Infinite Earths, Morrison began working on titles for DC, including his fan favorite revamp of Animal Man, a comic in which the titular character breaks out of his own universe by breaking through the walls between comic panels, ultimately ending with a head-tripping encounter between Animal-Man and Morrison himself. Weird much? Wait, it gets better.

Morrison went on to runs on other comics for DC, notably Doom Patrol, among others. Then he got abducted by aliens from the 5th dimension. Here's the good part, for those interested. These aliens took our dear friend Grant outside of his body, outside of space and time, and showed him the whole of existence. They showed him nature of reality, and then they put him back into his body and told him to tell others. So he wrote a comic book, called The Invisibles. Isn't that great? Apparently all the drugs he was taking had nothing to do with it. He swears.

In many ways The Invisibles are one of the first real post-deconstructionist comics. Deconstructionist comics, for the uninitiated, are things like Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns. Comics from around 1986 and the period following, when many of the genre conventions of the Silver Age of Comics were left behind. Unfortunately they weren't really replaced with much for quite a long time, and in that wake you had comics like Bloodshot, Youngblood, Bloodpool, Bloodstrike... well, you get the picture.

When The Invisibles first came out in 1996, it was something of a breath of fresh air, in so far as it was a comic that was really about something that didn't involve grimacing really hard and carrying a lot of really big guns and swords. It was a comic in which the characters were messed up like normal people are messed up. None of this, “I'm a super-hero but I can't get it up so I'm going to do heroin and beat myself girlfriend look at me aren't I edgy” bull-honkey. These people are the crazy bums talking to themselves, the drugged out weirdos, and the crazy hippies. They're all whacked out lunatics, but they're also plugged in to an aspect of the universe you couldn't even imagine.

The Invisibles, on the broadest levels, is about a group of magic terrorists, fighting against an evil worldwide conspiracy that exists to make life awful. Trying to speak more specifically is in many ways like trying to sculpt water. Sex, drug use, magic, UFOs, conspiracies on top of conspiracies, psychic time travel, and the evolution of mankind all feature heavily. Kind of like The Illuminatus! Trilogy in comic form, but with more transvestite shamans.

As in Animal Man years earlier, the lines between fiction and reality are blurred, both between the characters and the events in their lives, and between the characters and the reader, and you may experience altered head-states of your own, just from reading. Magic is a constant aspect of the series, and is what you would call 'real magic', in that it isn't Dr. Strange, hocus-pocus energy bolt magic. All of the magic done in the comic is magic that people have really (claimed to have) done. Even the comic itself is magic, according to Morrison.


The art was handled by 23 different artists over the course of the series, including Morrison himself. It is typically of a serious, realistic nature, although at points in the series there is a lean towards the more angular and stylized.

It's available as 7 trade paperbacks, and is probably just about the strangest, mind-bendingist thing that you will ever read. It may even distort your perception of the very world around you. As a word of warning however, if you do read this wonderful comic and you happen to find yourself questioning the fundamental nature of reality, let me remind you that it is not the universe that has changed, merely your perception of it, and advise eating something yummy and taking a nice shower. At that point, to paraphrase Douglas Adams, anything you still can't cope with is your problem.