I’ve never taken a gap year, but I’ve heard they’re nice. I would guess they were even nicer after being shot in the side and injected with a drug that made you think you were watching your fingers get cut off one-by-one, but that hasn’t happened to me (yet). But such a gap year happened to King Mob after his experience with Sir Miles in the bowels of the enemy’s territory and the host of horrors. As a result, we, the audience, get to experience a vacation abroad with The Invisibles: Bloody Hell in America by Grant Morrison, Phil Jimenez, John Stokes, Daniel Vozzo, and Todd Klein.

After the events of the previous volume, our team of Invisibles are on sabbatical in New York state, recuperating in the mansion of Mason Lang—another Invisible. With the entrance of Jolly Roger—head of an Invisibles cell and a former compatriot of King Mob—the group reenters the fight. But this fight takes them to the middle of nowhere in New Mexico to a location known as the Dulce facility. Inside, according to Roger, is an HIV vaccine she had seen before her team were wiped out by the forces inside.

Returning to the facility isn’t going to be all that easy, until it is. And then until it isn’t.

Jolly Roger was able to survive, but only by the whim of a man named Quimper, a figure in a mask who can push his consciousness into any number of people, and he was guiding Roger, along with the rest of the Invisible cell, into his trap.

Being in America necessitates a couple things—guns, vast landscapes, and classical American conspiracies. It’s no mistake the team ends up in New Mexico in a place not unlike Roswell breaking into a facility not unlike Area 51. Coupled with the figure of Oppenheimer and his line “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds” gives this volume a thesis for how the rest of this arc will play out. While the first arc was the introduction to the magic of the world and the enemies within, we’re given more of a strange magic, something inherently alien as we discover that Oppenheimer did not detonate a nuke, but in fact spoke an incantation to pull some unknowable, ultra-dimensional intelligence from beyond the veil of reality. This was our reality’s introduction to the Outer Church and the subjugation demanded by it.

Of course, their apocalypse had to happen on American soil.

The tonal shift inherent in this arc, coupled with Jimenez’s more bombastic art style , shows Morrison leaning into the idea of wide-screen comics. These were no longer the more introspective pieces that defined the earlier decade at Vertigo, but rather the action set-pieces that 90s comics became known for, albeit with a flare for the conspiratorial and spiritual. What would be the point of two people mowing down the forces of evil in a facility conducting horrific experiments on random civilians if there wasn’t some kind of counter-culture message behind it?

Get excited. Get big.

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