Escalation is narratively routine: you start slow before getting to the point where you can meet god or go to space.

Sometimes, though, “slow” can involve an immediate escalation to meeting god, so long as your setting allows. If the setting allows you to peer into a collapsing hyper-dimension exacerbated by the nanoparticles of a dreaded god-beast colliding with our reality to the point where simply being near its presence causes your body to decay, why not embrace it?

But then that’s a relatively typical scenario in the third volume of The Invisibles by Grant Morrison, Phil Jimenez, John Stokes, Tommy Lee Edwards, Paul Johnson, Steve Yeowell, Dick Giordano, Mark Buckingham, and Mark Pennington.

Shit’s getting rough out there, man. The King-Of-All-Tears is entering our dimension and slowly warping reality around it to the point where only nanomachine-enhanced blood can keep you from dying long enough to be in its presence, King Mob is actively dying from a gunshot wound while being tortured, Lord Fanny is shackled away from her friends, and Ragged Robin and the Boy don’t know where their friends have gone. And still no one knows where Dane has run off to other than he’s ducking around Liverpool trying to be from the Invisibles and their madness that he still sees glimpses of wherever he goes. But the apocalypse still has plans for Dane and the inhuman presence that has touched his mind, one that comes out further when he enters a joke shop in Liverpool that their adversaries have made their base.

I mentioned escalation earlier for two reasons: one is that this really is escalating as we’re seeing one of the beings manipulating the world crawling into our reality; two is that this is the end of the first volume of the story. We can see the way this structure is working through how the volumes have been laid out: three arcs for the first volume, three arcs for the second, and the final 12-issue series leading up to the new Millennium. As this is only our first volume of the story, we still haven’t hit our zenith in terms of stakes and drama. And that’s after everything we’ve seen in the story already. One of the best thing about Morrison’s writing that we’ve seen over the decades, and even more so in The Invisibles, is how the story’s structures escalate like a heart monitor—each arc ratcheting up the tension and each volume keeps the stakes higher and higher.

But then that’s just good story structure. If we don’t see an escalation, we’re not hooked. And at the same time, we need to know that the story can go further as we’re still looking across thirty-seven more issues of story. It’s a part of the magic of looking at a series this far out from its original publication, you know where the story is going to land, you just need to follow it takes through the sky.

Get excited. Get morphed.

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