But the second half of the book suffers from jarring time travel sequences, high gross-out content, arcane conversations, and a lack of sympathetic characters. The Marquis de Sade is, I think, *intended* to be such a viewpoint character, but I found him too strange and off-putting to have much sympathy for him. And the Invisibles themselves already seem to know everything.

That said, I have to conclude that it's a very ambitious and engrossing book nonetheless. The high point for me was Jack Frost's initiation to the Barbelo and whatnot, at the end of the 4th chapter. That had me really hooked, despite the fact that things got less interesting as the story went on.

I can definitely recommend this book to people who liked THE ILLUMINATUS! TRILOGY and some of the more paranoid Philip K. Dick novels; that sort of thing.


Could very possibly change your perception of reality.   July 16, 1998
 18 out of 24 found this review helpful

This book is a MUST read for anyone with Deconstructionist or Discordian views. It is a comic book, but don't let others opinions of comics and their content sway you. This is no juvenile super-hero in tights smash-em-up for 23 pages. The Invisibles is about subversion of the status quo, deconstruction of patterned and controlled thought and trying to make sure everyone benefits from the end of the world. This book could hold some very real changes of perception for you. As the young Dane McGowan/Jack Frost is initiated into the Invisibles, so are you, given small tidbits that the reality we're all being held to is only that way because it benefits others for you to see reality in this light. You create your reality, this book can and will show you that. There are large and sinister forces behind a lot of very shady dealings in government, business, entertainment, etc., not just in the U.S., but in the world. Don't take my word for it, start looking around, question aut! ! hority and what you see on TV, you might start to see what I mean. Grant Morrison has an eye that sees past all of this. If you really get into the Invisibles, it will seem like you're being let in on a very big secret. Admittedly, it can be a very cryptic and challenging read at times, but if you're willing to put in some effort, and research this work outside of this collection or the monthly issues, you may just start to find and see "the big secret" I've described. This book could change your life, and may start us all on the road to true physical and spiritual freedom.


Ee-gad   June 7, 2004
 17 out of 39 found this review helpful

This title is without a doubt the largest let down I've ever come across in the comics medium. Mr. Morrison has proven himself in other titles (Animal Man, JLA, Marvel Boy) to be a truly creative and fun writer and when I heard about this series, which he himself described as his most important work ever, I could not wait to get a copy.
Wish I could have waited.
It comes off like every self-proclaimed rebel's fantasy. We have a world where everyone is a souless puppet except for the beautiful, unappreciated misuderstood who are all total bad asses and take no guff. The bad guys are authority of any fashion and, so that we can have a liberal vs. conservative, old vs. new, rich vs. poor generic fight with the underdogs as moraly just, the world's establishments are all quite dispicible and consort with every evil ever conceived. So we can cut straight to the "we're so awesome, you can't contain us" anthem, the villains are shown as completely horrid with no point or back story.
They're evil and we're great. Yay people with tattoos and bad credit.
The characters go on to show a strange collection of powers, none of which are ever explained all that well, and the newbie character (Jack Frost) that we the audience are given as a point-of-view is the most unlikable brat to ever grace fiction. Throw in King Mob, the always one-step-ahead, man in charge, Mind's eye version of Morrison himself, and you got delicious cliche. Let cool for five minutes and serve.


Not my cup of reality-warping hallucinogenic tea.   June 9, 2006
 15 out of 24 found this review helpful

Long ago, a friend who raved about "The Invisibles" loaned me this first book. I don't have very clear memories of it, but I remembered it as being very hard to read, and I remember not getting very far in it before I lost interest.

Recently, due specifically to the influence of Warren Ellis's awesome series "Planetary", I've gotten interested in comics again, and decided to give "The Invisibles" a second try. I got a little further this time, but still didn't even make it past the first volume.

The story seems promising; "Big Brother is Watching, So Make Yourself Invisible". The eponymous team are a gang of reality-bending Crowley-style sorcerors, fighting the mundane system of everyday life, and the sinister otherworldly monsters who control the mundane system of everyday life. The execution, however, is less than ideal. MOST of the pages are very jarringly non-sequential; on one page, the characters will be in a park, listening in on a conversation, and then on the next page, where you expect to find a continuation of the conversation they were listening to, they'll suddenly be walking along a riverbank, in the middle of their own completely different and unrelated conversation. On almost every single page I had to turn back, and check the page numbering to make sure I hadn't accidentally skipped something or pages hadn't fallen out of the book; if it weren't for the sequential page numbering, I would have assumed I was reading a bad printing. This could be a clever technique if used sparingly; in a comic book about "hacking reality", throwing in a sudden and unexpected "jump cut" between two pages can contribute greatly to the reader's immersion in the "reality hacking", but when it's done on every other page it loses that hook and just feels sloppy, like the author and artist didn't know how to structure a comic.

One of the "page cuts" jumps from the beginnings of a fairly realistic fight scene to a super-bright, psychedelic scene in which a character is tripping out and talking to the ghost of John Lennon, which looks like a completely different comic, has completely different pacing and artwork, and is FILLED with meaningless text, which brings us to my next problem with "The Invisibles": there's WAY too much meaningless text. If you want to present a radical, reality-altering concept in your comic, that's great; try to do it with action as much as possible and with as few words as possible -- this is a visual medium, after all. If you need to throw in a few wordy bits, that's OK too ("Planetary", again, does a perfect job of this). If, however, you are filling ENTIRE PAGES with text so small that you have to go below standard comic font size and it becomes illegible, then you might want to re-think your medium and perhaps just write a book, or a really wordy animation, instead. It was after the third ENTIRE page of nothing but hard-to-read, handwritten, meaningless text that I gave up on "The Invisibles". And by "meaningless" I don't mean "fluff dialogue that pertains to the action" or "cryptic dialogue that might make sense later", I mean actually meaningless, gigantic word-bubbles of insane characters singing entire songs and babbling incoherently about things that have nothing to do with the plot, or meaningless stream of consciousness droning from characters who are tripping. All of this text feels like nothing but filler, and coupled with the jarring transitions between pages it makes "The Invisibles" look like VERY amateur work.

One last niggling detail is that I couldn't really identify with any of the characters. The main character, a teenage boy named "Dane", is basically a carbon-copy of Alex from "A Clockwork Orange", but without the interest in Beethoven. He wanders around London with his monosyllable-named "droogs", indiscriminately stealing cars, smashing windows, beating people up, and blowing up buildings. It's suggested that he's very smart, but this doesn't make him any more likeable. The "hook" is that he "sees dead people", which might've been clever when this series was first printed, but after "The 6th Sense", "Bleach", and a dozen other stories with "I see dead people" protagonists, it just seems cliched.

I really wanted to get the same sort of "reality warping" experience out of "The Invisibles" that some of my friends have, but I've seen it done better a dozen times before, and the whole execution just seems amateur. When I stopped reading it, I was hungry for some REAL reality warping, so I sat down and read some stories out of the collected fictions of Jorge Luis Borges and felt MUCH better. I suggest you skip "The Invisibles" and do the same.

Addendum: The friend who last loaned it to me told me that the first two story arcs were, indeed, horrible, but that it got significantly better after them. I tried reading it again, skipping over those first two story arcs and starting from the third, and it was indeed a much better read, and nothing was lost in having not read that first part. So, I'm upgrading my review to "a fun read overall, but not something I'd be interested in owning".