The Invisibles: Grant Morrison’s Magnum Opus
What the first volume of the legendary series can tell us about the nature of humanity, time, and reality itself
“And so we return and begin again.” That’s the very first sentence on the very first page of 1994’s The Invisibles #1 by Grant Morrison and Steve Yeowell. It seems like a rather innocuous beginning to a series that will go on to plunge the reader into different time periods, alternate planes of reality, and (most terrifying of all) the boardrooms of multinational corporations. That sentence, however, will prove to be a bit of a thesis statement for what Morrison has in store for us throughout the series. It’s a profoundly personal and philosophical work that almost serves as an evangelical text used by Morrison to spread the gospel that they believe the human race needs to hear in order to achieve its full potential of reaching divinity. What I’m trying to say is there is a lot going on in this comic book. This will be the first part of a three part series that inspects the themes, stories, and characters in each of the three volumes that Morrison wrote (along with some spectacular artists to bring the visuals to life).
The best place to start is with the titular Invisibles themselves. The Invisibles is the name given to a decentralized revolutionary organization made up of five member cadres around the globe as they fight against a hegemonic organization known as the Outer Church which is made up of interdimensional ultraterrestrial gods hellbent on keeping the human race in a state of docile servitude unaware of the truth of their existence. If that sounds somewhat similar to The Matrix, you’re not alone.
The first volume follows one cadre of Invisibles as they look to recruit a fifth member as one of their previous members, John-a-Dreams, is no longer with the group. Readers will learn his fate much later in the series. For now the members of the Invisibles you need to know are King Mob, Ragged Robin, Lord Fanny, and Boy.
King Mob is the leader of the cadre. He is a veteran revolutionary, martial artist, chaos magician, occultist, time traveler, and low level psychic. In this first volume, he is also a skilled gunfighter. His appearance is extremely similar to Morrison’s real life appearance at the time (white, thin, bald, and frequently wearing sunglasses), and indeed is meant to be an avatar for Morrison themselves. His name is derived from the real world King Mob radical group spun out of the Situationist International (a political and philosophical group founded by Guy Debord that espoused left communist critiques of mass media and championed avant-garde art including Dadaism).
His lover and fellow Invisible teammate is Ragged Robin. She is the team’s psychic powerhouse and time travel expert (though we don’t learn to what extent until the next volume). Her appearance and name are based on the Raggedy Ann dolls as well as real life artist Jill Thompson (who would draw multiple issues of The Invisibles).
Lord Fanny is a Brazilian transgender shaman who can commune with the Aztec god of death Mictlantecuhtli. She is also able to experience all time simultaneously while in the underworld of Mictlan. She is also yet another avatar meant to represent Morrison in the series.
Boy is a former NYPD officer and expert in hand-to-hand combat. She spends much of the first volume training the newest recruit to her Invisibles cadre, Dane McGowan.
Dane McGowan (who will later take on the name Jack Frost) is the ride along character in the series. He’s a rebellious youth from Liverpool who is targeted by the Invisibles as a potential new recruit. He is also targeted by the Outer Church as a potential threat. Think of him as the Keanu Reeves of this story. Also, he is yet another avatar for Morrison in the series meant to reflect their younger self. Morrison sure loves self-insert characters.
With the protagonists now established, let’s examine some of the themes and story arcs in this initial volume. I will avoid major spoilers because this really is a series that should be read and reread to be fully appreciated. Being fed story beats point by point just would not do the material justice. I would also like to add that the message and themes being conveyed by the story do shift partway through due to Morrison having a life altering experience that I will absolutely be diving into.
One thing that is very important to understanding The Invisibles is knowing that Grant Morrison is a real life practitioner of chaos magic. They believe that it is possible to create change by using belief as a tool. In essence, by getting enough people to focus on something and imbue it with belief will make that thing real. What this means is that The Invisibles exists both as a comic book and as a hypersigil. It works like this: Morrison wants to communicate an important message to readers in the book and get them to believe in that message. By getting thousands and potentially millions to read the book over time and believe in that message, it will lead to an actual physical change in the real world.
So what is that message and how does it relate to the actual story? Early issues focus on the character of Dane McGowan as both sides try to condition and re-educate him into seeing the world their way. The Outer Church takes him to a juvenile detention center/reeducation camp in order to excise his rebellious attitude and make him a docile conformist to a hive mind style society. King Mob breaks him out and leaves him on his own in London to be trained into harnessing that rebellious attitude and being able to see the hidden truth of the world by an eccentric man named Tom O’Bedlam. Side note: it’s now impossible for me to read Tom’s voice as anything other than Willem Dafoe from The Lighthouse. Anyway, Tom unlocks Dane’s ability to see the world for what it is along with unlocking some of his latent abilities tied to a suppressed identity he created to protect himself named Jack Frost (which would go on to become is team name as a member of the Invisibles).
Once Dane/Jack is on the team, the group psychically projects their minds back in time to France in 1793 to link up with the Marquis de Sade and find the cyborg head of John the Baptist. Very normal activities. Meanwhile, a demon named Orlando in present day attempts to locate and kill their bodies while their minds are projected into the past. I know what you’re thinking. This all sounds bizarre and confusing. Trust me when I say this is all pretty straightforward compared to where things end up.
The arc lasts the first nine issues and wraps up with Dane/Jack deciding he’s had enough of these shenanigans and takes off. Three somewhat self-contained issues follow to help flesh out the world and serve as a bit of an amuse-bouche before launching into the meat of Morrison’s story.
The next three issues compose the “She-Man” story arc about Lord Fanny’s origin and how she gets caught up in her present day dilemma. It is my personal favorite arc of the first volume. Young Lord Fanny at only eleven years old enters the underworld of Mictlan where she experiences all time simultaneously. Morrison expertly tells the story similarly with three different moments in her life are being told to us as though they are happening in parallel. There is Fanny at eleven speaking to gods in a mystical realm, Fanny at eighteen going through a traumatic experience as a sex worker in Rio, and Fanny at twenty-three dealing with an agent working for the Outer Church. All three periods are moments when Fanny fights and overcomes terrible experiences in different ways, but they are experienced in a way that makes it seem as though she’s conquering them all at the same moment in time.
The final ten issues of the first volume are the most obviously influenced by the major life event Grant Morrison experienced in 1994 that I had previously teased. They are also the ones that most obviously influenced The Matrix even if the Wachowskis haven’t acknowledged it. To put them most simplistically: the Outer Church has captured King Mob and are attempting to hack into his brain to learn everything there is to know about the Invisibles in order to crush the resistance once and for all. King Mob’s only hope is for Dane McGowan to accept his messianic fate as Jack Frost and come to his rescue. These issues were published in 1996, three years before The Matrix would hit cinemas. I’m just saying. As a bit of an aside, Morrison became dangerously ill while these issues were being published. They came to believe that by making their self-insert character on the verge of death in the comic, it was working as a sigil and putting themselves on the verge of death in real life. Wild stuff.
Before getting into what is truly important in these issues from a thematic perspective, let’s finally cover what exactly happened to Grant Morrison that would come to shape the narrative in The Invisibles going forward. Morrison visited Kathmandu, Nepal in 1994 while they were already writing The Invisibles. They visited a temple where they had heard if you are able to run up all 350 steps in one breath, you could achieve enlightenment. Being someone who would definitely want to achieve enlightenment, they did exactly that. Two days later in their hotel, they had what could best be described as a mystical experience. I want to preface this by saying Morrison swears to this day that the only drugs in their system were a small quantity of hash. Grant Morrison in their own words:
There are one or two entities interacting with the space I'm in. They look a little like the morphing, liquid-chrome blobs from rave videos; capable of emerging from and returning to the substance of the furniture and even the air itself. Although I'm undoubtedly in the room - calm and pleasantly Spartan, with its wooden beds and shutters, its firm and sensible bolsters - I'm simultaneously aware of something bigger than the room, something of which the Vajra, Nepal, and the entire universe beyond are simply cross-sections. I'm aware of time as a topographical object I'm able to view all at once, in its entirety. The dinosaurs are over here, right next to Shakespeare and the completed Millennium Dome.
It seems to me that I've suddenly woken up to my original condition; I've always been a higher dimensional fractal froth of thinking quicksilver. So too has everyone else. In fact, our physical bodies are all facets of the same fractal froth of thinking mercury. Meanwhile, these others are blending with me, constantly exchanging raw information like saliva, asking me where I'd like to go now.
I won’t include every word of what they had to say to describe the experience, but this section seems especially important.
The entities - our own 'future' or 'higher' aspects, or so it seems - exist to create and to play and their games involve complete immersion in the gameboard that is our space-time universe. Total identification with any selected game piece allows 'them' to experience all the thrills of time and pain and human emotion.
I'm starting to grasp the concept; our physical bodies are equivalent to computer-game sprites or chess pieces; the entire universe I've grown up in and will die in is a constructed playing field. The super-reality I'm experiencing is simply what you see when you break concentration and look up from the Game.
What Morrison is saying (or at least how they interpreted the experience) is they came into contact with beings that exist in five-dimensional space. They exist on a plane far beyond what we are able to perceive in our daily lives. Morrison believes the message they were given is to let humanity know that all life in the universe is essentially one infinite super-organism that is being observed by beings that exist in a higher dimension that can view all space and time simultaneously as though reading the panels of a comic book. If all that exists is one massive super-organism, then it is in each individual’s self-interest to behave altruistically and treat everything around us with respect and reverence. It’s a bit of a synthesis of Gnosticism and panentheism. To take things a step further, Morrison believes these fifth-dimensional globule beings can read all of our thoughts just as easily as we can read the word bubbles on the pages of a comic book.
So how does this experience influence the story in The Invisibles? Well Dane McGowan has an experience almost identical to Morrison’s Kathmandu experience in The Invisibles #16 that inspires him to fully embrace his Jack Frost identity and come to the aid of King Mob. Once again, I don’t want to spoil any big reveals in the final issues of the first volume. The important takeaway here is that Morrison has adopted the moral mission charged to them by these beings and is inserting it into the pages of their hypersigil. The Invisibles continue to fight the Outer Church, but from this point forward their tactics are less like an action movie and are more of a metaphysical nature. Jack Frost is very much “The One” in this story, but instead of fighting the King-of-Tears of the Outer Church with martial arts he has to engage in a spiritual battle as the next Buddha.
Hopefully I’ve impressed upon you just what makes The Invisibles such an engaging and thought provoking read. If this tickles your fancy, come back next week for a look at the second volume. In the meantime, I leave you with a fun little video on the philosophy of Grant Morrison.