Any good team book needs a few issues where you learn more about the people we’re following. While the first volume of The Invisibles focuses primarily on Dane McGowan—our lad is going to be the focal-point for much of the series—for the second volume, we start seeing the foundations of others on the team and a basis for their magicks. It’s here that we learn more about Lord Fanny and her relationship with time in Apocalipstick by Grant Morrison, Jill Thompson, Chris Weston, John Ridgway, Steve Parkhouse, Paul Johnson, Dennis Cramer, Daniel Nozzo, and Clem Robins.

Shortly after their ordeal at the Windmill retrieving the Marquis de Sade with a bit of projective time travel, Dane disappears. With the magics he learned from Tom O’Bedlam, he’s able to effectively disappear into the streets of London—even members of his team walk right past him in an alley without a glance. But their questions have piqued the ears of their adversaries as they also search for Dane as a wedge to fully infiltrate and subsume the Invisibles as a resistance group. Lord Fanny’s questions have brought an adversarial agent, a man named Brodie Lewis, into her life just as the effects of the first ritual that attuned her to magic began again. Living simultaneously through her first initiation, the moment when she was nearly killed at 18, and her current predicament, we see the fragmented nature of her existence before things get much more violent.

In the first volume of The Invisibles, Morrison introduces us to their idea of magic and how it functions. But in these first issues, the ideas are nebulous—there’s phrases being uttered and general rituals referenced, but the ideas aren’t entirely concrete. This is likely to do with Morrison’s own interest in Chaos Magick and the ways in which that functions, but it’s in this volume that we see specific gods being referenced. Aztec gods like Tezcatlipoca, Quetzalcoatl, and Tlazolteotl in particular are referenced by name and aspects of them interact with Lord Fanny as both child and adult. While we see some of Morrison’s interest in the Aztec religions as a means of conveying magic in stories, we also see how this is used to further explore magic as a concept within the confines of The Invisibles itself. The magic isn’t without rules and it isn’t without structure, but the rules and structure aren’t so important that can can supersede what needs to happen in the story. The form of magic persists, but its function is to help push our characters forward.

Things happen in this volume, though, that don’t quite have their place here. We still see aliens and voodoo magics, but the core of this story is Lord Fanny herself. But that just shows how much Morrison is able to pack into these issues as everything feels like it’s expanding outward until we hit our zenith in the new Millennium only a few years away from this volume’s beginning. 

Get excited. Get looking.

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