This far into a series, you would think we’d have a solid understanding of how the story, world, or characters can go. We know who these people are and what the Invisibles as an organization is like. Or, rather, we have an understanding of what we think these characters and organization are like.

For the penultimate volume of this arc of The Invisibles, we dive further into the background of more characters and learn just how the organization they work with can test the mental fortitude of its members. This is how Grant Morrison, Marc Hempel, Michael Lark, Phil Jimenez, Chris Weston, John Stokes, Keith Aiken, Philip Bond, and Glyn Dixon bring us further into Counting to None.

We begin with time travel. Or the basis of what time travel can be as a monk folds an origami form that was sent to him by his great grandson to remember to teach his mother so he would grow up knowing the form to create the suit in which time travel occurs. But that’s only one kind of time travel as this cell of the Invisibles has to make a pact with the Harlequinade to obtain an occult object known as the Hand of Glory and King Mob has to project his consciousness seventy years into the past to learn how to use it. But even after learning how to use it, we run into further complications as the Boy has run off with the hand as a means of exacting revenge on the people who killed her brother.

This is a volume of revelations and connections—as it should be since we do only have two more arcs until the series’ conclusion. While we think we’re getting to a place where we know most of what’s happening, we learn just how little we know. We find that Ragged Robin was telling the truth multiple volumes ago when she said she was born in 1988 as she’s actually from 2012 and was sent back in time. Tom O’Bedlam is actually a man named Freddie, cousin to one of the oldest of the Invisibles that we’ve met, Edith Manning, and comes back in a recreation to a page from the third issue of the series. We discover as well that there are cells within the Invisibles that have been running simulations against different members to ensure their minds are safe from enemy attacks—a small cell almost no one knew existed. But these moments all fit together seamlessly—every revelation is the closing of a grander circle.

Counting to None proves a point about The Invisibles as a series: it’s not all just psycho-babble and random assemblages of magic. The series has grander stories in mind. We can see just how the arcs all start to coalesce, showing us the grander arcs of each character and the journey they’ve all been on together. We can also see how this is a series that really does reward sitting down to read the whole thing in a multi-part burst.

Get excited. Get circular.

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