Somehow the pull of the pile increases every day. There’s depths to it that have followed me across multiple homes and multiple global changes. I always think that, with more time being put into chipping away at the pile, I’ll finally get to things released in this decade. Somehow, I’m always wrong as I dug deep and bumped into a series I’ve been waiting to cover once I got its final volume. And that finally happened so it’s time dive into 2019’s Invisible Kingdom by G. Willow Wilson, Christian Ward, and Sal Cipriano. 

The first volume of Invisible Kingdom gives us a galaxy in which a massive corporation sells nearly anything anyone needs with fast delivery across multiple planets and systems while a selective religious order affixes eye-concealing helmets to their acolytes to keep the “lies” of the world from them. But at least we’re all in space at this point, so that’s a kind of plus. Even still, we follow Grix, the captain of a delivery vessel for Lux that has to make a crash landing and upon reviewing her manifest, notices a massive sum of money for an order that isn’t on the ship. On another planet we have Vess, a recently anointed None for the Renunciation religious order that has just been made scriptorian for her convent. But going through the files of Mother Proxima, the head of this convent, she notices large sums of money coming and going from Lux through the very terminal she’s working on.

There’s a twist in this volume that feels like it would be the climax at the end of the story and that’s Grix releasing evidence of the collusion between Lux and the Renunciation on the web. And this revelation that the biggest company in the galaxy and the largest religious order is met with tacit indifference—most people react with the cynical declaration of “duh, isn’t that obvious?” and move on. No triumph meets our crew, no final blow against corruption and greed that govern their lives, just people shrugging their shoulders and going about their days. And coming from a comic in 2019 feels prescient to our current situation—sometimes a sci-fi series can predict things a bit too literally. But this inverse of our expectations works well in a fictional context as we now have more story for the new two volumes of this series.

A good science fiction story acts as a mirror to our world—one that reflects and exaggerates to show us the extent to which things like religious and corporate influence can prove disastrous for humanity. I do miss the time in which the reflections were exaggerated, but they might have been more so seven years ago when this series first released. Now we simply have to deal with our very strange and fluid present, but at least we have good comics to turn to in times of perpetual crisis. 

Get excited. Get known.

Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, 510, 651, & 674) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.