Comic Book / The Invisibles

Clockwise from top left: Dane "Jack Frost" MacGowan, Lord Fanny, Boy, King Mob and Ragged Robin. From the cover of volume 2, issue 1.

"It's only a game. Try to remember."

Possibly one of the most highly-regarded Comic Book series of the 1990s, Grant Morrison's The Invisibles is an electric mashup of James Bond movies, 1960s psychedelia, Cosmic Horror Story, Gnostic theory, Nineteen Eighty-Four, The Prisoner, The Illuminatus! Trilogy and the books of Philip K. Dick, with guest appearances by various Historical Domain Characters. It's one of the best-regarded original titles from Vertigo Comics.

It begins with young Dane MacGowan — a Liverpudlian tearaway with growing psychic power — who becomes a target for two sides of an ancient war: The Invisible College, fighting for chaos and limitless freedom, and The Outer Church, which wants to grind down all individuality and turn humans into mindless drones.

He soon joins up with an Invisible cell comprising psychic assassin King Mob, transgender shaman Lord Fanny, martial arts expert Boy and mysterious redhead Ragged Robin. Together they strike at The Outer Church and its Earthly representatives, trying to free the world of its sick grip. But neither side knows the true secret of the universe, or what is really coming at the end of time on December 21st, 2012...

The comic has been equally lauded and criticized for its complicated, nigh-on-labyrinthine structure, which jumps backward and forward in time and - particularly at the end of the third volume - requires the reader to put in some effort to unravel what exactly is going on. It's also let down by art of varying quality, particularly in the 10th and 11th issues of the third volume which had a different artist every couple of pages. However, it remains Morrison's best-received non-superhero work and one of the high watermarks of '90s comic books. Many of its themes appeared in early forms in Morrison's Doom Patrol and would be continued in Morrison's The Filth.

Not to be confused with Arthur and the Invisibles.

Generally regarded as being one of the primary inspirations for The Matrix, alongside Ghost in the Shell. Morrison even said that while they felt plagiarized, that just meant the comic was working as intended (Morrison also said that they saw the sequels and wished the Wachowskis kept stealing their ideas).

BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING. BECOME INVISIBLE.

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The Invisibles provides examples of:

• After the End: Some of the parallel universes the characters cross through are post-apocalyptic and quite unpleasant.
• Alternate Self: Ragged Robin is not just an expy of Crazy Jane from Doom Patrol, the series Morrison used to write before The Invisibles, but an alternate-universe version of her.
• All Myths Are True: As long as someone believes in them, all Gods exist. The series shows Aztec gods, Norse gods, Hindu gods, Christian figures, Haitian loas, Gnostic entities and much more.
• Anachronic Order: The comic jumps around between several different time periods, sometimes on the same page. Characters are shown narrating the events of the "present day" from several years in the future, for example.
• Another Dimension: Our universe is a hologram created by two other universes intersecting. Or a five-dimensional structure in a growing larval stage. Or something.
• Aristocrats Are Evil: Lord Miles; also Queen Elizabeth II is shown to be involved with The Outer Church in "The Invisible Kingdom". The original Evil Aristocrats, the Duke, Bishop, Judge, and Banker of Sade's 120 Days of Sodom, also pop up briefly, and end up eating some delicious Adaptational Karma.
• Arc Symbol:
  • A large red circle with a black line through it, symbolising the Barbelith entity that ultimately brings about the new age by ending the world.
  • The magic mirror, aka "the grey floating goo that Fanny puked that time."
• Arc Words:
  • "It's only a game. Try to remember." It's foreshadowing that the whole story may just be a viral video game invented by King Mob in 2012 that retells the whole story from the perspective of various characters.
  • "What side are you on?". The right answer is that it's a rhetorical question: good and evil are the same side.
  • "Barbelith". It's eventually revealed that it's the name of the sentient satellite that serves as an interface between our reality and the Invisible College.
  • "Nice and smooth", usually in reference to how the Invisibles should operate.
  • During the second volume, "Time machine go".
• Art Evolution: Compare Ragged Robin's first appearance in Volume 1 to her appearance mid-way through Volume 2—she goes from being quite reedy and thin-looking, dressed in extremely feminine clothing, to being built like a brick shithouse and dressing quite literally in leather fetish gear. This may also be a reflection of Robin's Character Development throughout Volume 2. As the series goes on, she loses the tiny black bows in her hair, as well, probably because they were a bastard to draw.
• Artistic License – Religion: In Jim Crow's first appearance, he is on television, criticizing other Black rappers for converting to Islam, as "that monotheistic bullshit's the tool of the oppressor." He claims a greater degree of authenticity for having converted to Haitian Voodoo instead, which he describes as "the original African religion." While Vodou does incorporate beliefs from a variety of West and Central African religions, it also incorporates a lot of Catholic beliefs, and traces its origins to the 16th century. Islam has been present on the African continent since the 7th century. Of course, Crow is the kind of guy who'd say things like this just to be a Troll, and his religious beliefs seem to be as effective as anybody else's in the comic.
• Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence: What happens to mankind on December 21st, 2012, maybe.
• Author Avatar: This is a weird one. For whatever reason, King Mob greatly resembles Grant Morrison: both are tall, skinny bald Scottish people (in 2020, Morrison came out as non-binary). In the letters column of the final issue of volume 1, Morrison relates the story of how, at the same time they stuck King Mob in a torture chamber with a gunshot wound to the stomach for about six issues, Morrison collapsed and nearly died because of a deflated lung. Morrison found this significant. More complexly, King Mob at one point uses an alter-ego/parody/lookalike of himself, Gideon Stargrave, the psychedelic mod superspy assassin, as an allegedly-fictional cover for his own identity while being psychically probed by his enemies. In an afterward, Morrison explains that they themself had specifically invented Gideon Stargrave in their teens as a deliberate Author Avatar (Stargrave's adventures were published in two issues of the Scottish comicbook Near Myths, when Morrison was 17). So King Mob fits this trope coming and going. Particularly in light of their answers to reader letters at the end of each issue, it's hard to come away from the series with the impression that King Mob is anything but what Morrison would dearly love to be. That last bit is pretty much the point of the work—as a chaos magician, they intended for it to be a hypersigil. A normal sigil is (briefly) a magic spell encapsulated in a picture; a hypersigil would be a sigil with the added dimension of time.
  • Ragged Robin is also directly based on artist Jill Thompson, and both her and Morrison have noted there's a lot of Jill in Robin's characterization.
• Back to Front: Volume 3 starts at issue 12 and counts backwards to 1, when Barbelith "downloads" all of humanity and kickstarts the next phase of their existence.
• Being Tortured Makes You Evil: Colonel Friday's backstory. The Outer Church's preferred method of "recruitment" in general.
• Big Bad: Sir Miles Delacourt, Director of MI6, high-ranking human collaborator with the Outer Church, and general all-around depraved British bastard. His masters the Archons are comparatively a lot more hands-off.
• Big Eater: Baron Samedi, in keeping with real-life Voodoo belief. At one point, a believer asks him for aid, and he has her prepare him a feast in exchange. He even needs to stop for several snacks while he's performing the favor. May be at least partly because some of his magic is Cast from Calories.
• Big Good:
  • The final arc heavily implies that the Blind Chessman, the Harlequin, and the King in Yellow are all the same being, or different aspects of it, and that he/they is the ultimate head of the Invisibles.
  • The Barbelith entity seems to be this, mostly, but it's subverted somewhat in that it has Blue-and-Orange Morality, and while the narrative depicts its final act - causing The End of the World as We Know It and the entire human race Ascending to a Higher Plane of Existence - as neither entirely negative nor entirely positive, it still causes all the characters we've grown to love to effectively cease to exist in the forms we've come to know them in. At any rate, it's far less evil than any of the other eldritch beings we're introduced to over the course of the story.
• Bomb Throwing Anarchist:
  • Jack Frost starts as one. The rest of the series deconstructs this trope.
  • The 1920s King Mob was one of the originals, even blowing up a police station with a Cartoon Bomb.
• Body Horror: Miss Dwyer's body modifications in "Entropy in the U.K."; what happens to Bambi in "Bloody Hell in America".
• Both Order and Chaos are Dangerous: One of the central themes.
• Brainwashed and Crazy: Jolly Roger in "Bloody Hell in America", Boy in "American Death Camp."
• Brown Note:
  • Colonel Friday is forced to put his armor on when one of his superiors appears in a form that causes his guts to start bleeding.
  • The Archons are Brown Note Beings that cause cancer to whoever is near them. Their subordinates must recieve painful cybernetic upgrades to withstand their presence.
• Butch Lesbian: Jolly Roger, an attractive lesbian biker with short-cropped hair, an eyepatch, and a fondness for over-the-top firearms.
• Captain Ersatz: Mason Lang is the Invisibles' Bruce Wayne.
• Cast from Calories: The zozo pointing-bone gun takes so much out of Jim Crow that he needs a meal immediately after using it.
• Chekhov's Gun: The "World's Best Dad" mug.
• The Capital of Brazil Is Buenos Aires: Lord Fanny's backstory involves a clever subversion. She's shown in a classic Latin-American mix-up setting: supposedly in Rio but full of people talking in Spanish (Brazilians speak Portuguese) about Hernán Cortez and the Aztecs (both Mexican concepts). A couple of pages later, her grandmother says they need to go back to their homeland, Mexico (meaning we were watching a Mexican immigrant family in Brazil).
• Clap Your Hands If You Believe: A central theme of the series: Reality is malleable and shaped by stories and beliefs.
• Code Name: Each of The Invisibles has a code name that effectively becomes their 'second self'. This has very real power in a world of true names and sympathetic magic, and taking a code name like Tom O'Bedlam has some serious risks.

• Conditioned to Accept Horror: The plump, motherly, middle-aged maid who serves tea and snacks and has a nice little chat with Sir Miles and a Torture Technician while they take a break from torturing a beaten and critically-wounded King Mob, who is sitting right there.
• Conspiracy Kitchen Sink: In the world of the comic, many real-world conspiracy theories are true; specifically, they're the Outer Church's various plans to eliminate all except absolute conformity.
• Cool Old Lady: Edith Manning in the present is a nonagenarian and very helpful to the heroes.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: In "Season of Ghouls," drug company executives create a type of super-crack that kills its users at doses that the average crackhead would consider normal, feeds their souls to the scorpion loa Baron Zaraquin, and turns their bodies into zombies under the executives' control. Which the executives then use to terrorize the ghetto with sprees of rape, murder, and torture that they engage in purely For the Evulz. It takes something special to stand out as vile in a cast full of demons, eldritch abominations, and their willing servants, but they manage. They're even horrible to each other.
• The Corruption: Serving the Archons changes people both physically and psychologically.
• Cosmic Deadline: The world is supposed to come to an end (wake up? be born?) on December 21st, 2012. It does. "Our sentence is up."

• Covers Always Lie: The covers for the issues in the third volume were intentionally surreal and subtly hinted at the story without being explicit.
• Crazy-Prepared: King Mob has booby-trapped his own car just in case someone steals it.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: Gelt, a high ranking Outer Church servant, is shot by King Mob. The undignified part is when he is reincarnated in a beetle that is then crushed unawarely by Dane.
• Cultural Rebel: Dane (a white English teenage guy) is a big fan of gangsta rap, and he asks Boy (a young African-American woman) whether she likes it. She says it's okay, but she prefers European techno. Later, we find out that her brother was an actual gangsta rapper.

• Dimension Lord: The Archons turned their home universe into a giant death camp, and ours is next on their list.
• Diner Brawl: A local cowboy doesn't like the fact that Lord Fanny is transgender and tries to pick a fight. Doesn't go well when the heroes take down entire military bases on their off days.

• Don't Fear the Reaper: As discussed in Every Body Hates Hades, the death gods in this setting are actually fairly benevolent (in keeping with their actual depictions in myth). When we see Papa Guedhe collect Miss Dwyer's soul in a context that is neither combat nor punishment, he's actually quite gentle about it.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: In the first issue Dane is portrayed as a Brilliant, but Lazy student, displaying some knowledge of Russian history and being able to steal a car with an advanced alarm in just two minutes. This characterization vanishes after a couple issues.
• Eldritch Abomination: A favorite of Morrison.
  • The Archons, the masters of the Outer Church, are hideous extradimensional demons who resemble mishmashes of various Earthly animals, especially arthropods. Unlike H.P. Lovecraft's original abominations, the Archons are creatures of order rather than chaos.
  • Barbelith is a sentient satellite that operates as a bridge between the Invisible College and the Earth. It's heavily implied to be our universe's placenta. When our reality "evolves" on the 22/12/12 it's because Barbelith has exploded, symbolizing our reality finally being birthed.
  • The Roswell incident. In the Dulce base there is a mass made of what seems to be magic mirror that "fell" on Earth after the detonation of an atomic bomb. It's implied to be God but if you look into it further the truth becomes more complicated.^note You see, in Kathmandu Morrison believes to have experienced reality from a pentadimensional perspective. They claim to have seen mercurial sprites who reside in such higher dimensions, and who are essentially the "writers" of our reality. The Magic Mirror is implied to be these mercurial sprites, and so is this "God".
  • The Aztec Gods, such as Tezcatlipoca, are reimagined in a far more eldritch and mystical light. Which makes sense, seeing as how the Aztec Pantheon is considered one of the weirdest and most eldritch ones in American mythology.
  • On a similar note, Voodoo loas/lwas like Papa Ghede appear as chimeras of spiders, scorpions and other bugs. The aforementioned Ghede is this reality's Grim Reaper, or rather one of them.
• Eldritch Location: Mictlan, Tezcatlipoca's realm, the Invisible College, Dulce base, the lwa realm Jim Crow visits, and the whole Earth after Barbelith pops in the finale.
• Empowered Badass Normal: Most of The Invisibles don't have powers per se but can tap into different forces or kinds of magic.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: The series doesn't shy away from the fact that the mooks and villains the characters gleefully mow down are people with families that are hurt by their loss. Part of what makes Jack Frost's brand of Invisiblism the "Good" part of The Good, the Bad, and the Evil is that he takes this into account.
• Even Evil Has Standards: The Myrmidon are utterly disgusted by Orlando's sadism.
• Evil Is Petty: The real reason why the Archons want to enslave all of reality? Sheer spite.
• Expy:
  • Gideon Stargrave is an Expy of Michael Moorcock's protagonist Jerry Cornelius. The caption boxes relating to him even parody the distinctive chapter titles and prose style of the Cornelius stories. It later turns out that the Cornelius stories exist in-universe and King Mob was consciously imitating them.
  • Lewis Brodie, the Outer Church agent who captures King Mob and Fanny, is a parody of Bodie from The Professionals, played by Lewis Collins.
  • All of the "Division X" characters are Expies of figures from 1970s British police series:
    • Paddy Crowley is George Cowley from The Professionals.
    • George Harper and Jack Flint are George Carter and Jack Regan from The Sweeney.
    • Jon Six is Jason King from Department S and later his own eponymous show.
• Everybody Hates Hades: Averted. Baron Samedi is certainly willing to Pay Evil unto Evil, but is portrayed overall as the benevolent and (morbidly) cheerful figure of genuine Voodoo. Mictlantecuhtli is a bit grumpier, but that might just be because Tezcatlipoca is making promises on his behalf. He's still willing to let Fanny go for the price of a good laugh. He's also completely blase about Fanny's transgenderism. It's not like he's never seen such things before, after all.
• Fade to White: The last image in the series is the period on Dane's final sentence, then pure white.
• Fad Super: King Mob reinvented himself several times throughout the series to remain fashionable.
• Fallen Hero: John-a-Dreams—once close to King Mob—is later observed scheming with Lord Miles, underscoring (as the series winds down) the increasing Mirror Character emphasis.

• Fan Disservice: Many, many examples throughout the series. At one point early on, for instance, the characters are accidentally transported into The 120 Days of Sodom, the Marquis de Sade's infamous novel about rape, torture, and murder. In the "Entropy in the UK" arc, Miss Dwyer, a busty, curvy woman working for the Outer Church, whips out her boobs... which we see are crisscrossed with disgusting blue veins that carry alien nanobots, which wrinkly old Sir Miles proceeds to drink right to protect his body from the Archons' cancer-causing presence.
• Fantastic Drug: The "blue mold" in an abandoned Underground station, and Ragged Robin's use of "Sky" to bootstrap her jump from fiction to reality (or is it the other way around?).
• Ms. Fanservice: Ragged Robin and Helga. Fanny too if you're into transgenders.
• Mr. Fanservice: King Mob appears a lot naked or flexing his abs. Jim Crow also is quite attractive.
• Flock of Wolves: Every member of the Metropolitan Police's secret occult crime squad Division X is actually an Invisible double-agent. Jon Six was the only one to know all the others were moles, George Harper didn't even know that he was a mole due to using a Memory Gambit, and the other two thought that they were the only one.
• Gainax Ending: Nothing else could have worked, really.
• Genetic Abomination: The Moonchild is a mixture of human DNA and archon DNA and has lived 200 years inside a mirror. When it is crowned King of England, the King Archon will use it as an avatar to enslave the universe.
• Greater-Scope Villain:
  • The masters of the Outer Church are the hideous Archons, led by the King-of-Worlds and also including King-in-Chains, King-of-Tears, and at least two others, from the evil meta-universe below our own. They are unable to permanently manifest in our dimension, however, and depend on highly placed human collaborators to execute their will... at least until the Moonchild ritual.
  • Also of note here is Miss Dwyer. Once a normal woman, she was extensively modified by the Archons to serve as their High Priestess, and as such is the only human Outer Church member confirmed to outrank Sir Miles. Despite this, she only directly interacts with the main characters during a single arc, and is killed off at the end of it, leaving Miles to become the conspiracy's frontman for the remainder of the series.
• Grey-and-Gray Morality: One of the big points of the series. It manages to find it behind an almost Anviliciously black-and-white conflict. By the final volume, it settles on The Good, the Bad, and the Evil, with the evil being the Outer Church, the bad being traditional Invisiblism, and the good being Jack Frost's new pacifistic Invisiblism that ends up saving the day in the end.
• Half-Human Hybrid: The Moonchild, a half-human, half-Archon member of the British Royal Family. If he becomes King, then the leader of the Archons will be able to jump into our universe, heralding what the Invisible Helga sums up as "Concentration Camp Earth."
• Hand of Glory: The Hand of Glory is a powerful artifact that can open doors in timespace – i.e. open gates to other worlds and ages. It is hinted that the Hand is Jack Frost's own hand, who uses it to fold in time like a cursor on a computer screen.
• Heir Club for Men: Inverted. Only the women in Lord Fanny's family can become shamans, and her grandmother pressured her mother to try again when Lord Fanny was born biologically male. Unfortunately, she died before she could. Fortunately, transwomen are eligible.
• Higher Understanding Through Drugs: There are several occasions where characters gain deeper knowledge via drugs, both real and imaginary ones. The most notable example of the latter is the blue mold the protagonist Dane and his mentor Tom smoke, allowing Dane to contact the Barbelith, though it's later revealed that the mold was just regular mold with no narcotic qualities at all.
• Historical Hero Upgrade: The second major arc features the Marquis de Sade as Not Evil, Just Misunderstood, and the man himself states he's never actually done anything straight-up illegal. In real life, while he wasn't as bad as the characters he created, there's ample evidence he really was a dangerous sexual predator. The Marquis also states that he wrote his infamously disturbing works to shed light on the depravity and hypocrisy of the ruling class and show how absolute power corrupts absolutely; while this is indeed one interpretation of his work in real life, just as many analysts feel he wanted his audience to agree with his depraved Villain Protagonists.
• Hollywood Voodoo: Averted by the character Jim Crow. He uses authentic Voodoo incantations in Haitian Creole, allows himself to be "ridden" by the loa Baron Samedi (who behaves in the exact manner described by Voodoo practitioners), and invokes other loa such as Cousin Legba. The issue "Season of Ghouls" also depicts a fairly realistic voodoo ritual, complete with fetishes, idols, blood, candles, etc.
• How We Got Here: In "How I Became Invisible", "And Half a Dozen of the Other" and "The Invisible Kingdom".
• Humanoid Abomination: Plenty, considering Morrison's love for Cosmic Horror.
  • Quimper is a deformed imp creature that acts as a Mind Virus, infecting repressed memories and making them consume the host.It used to be a ciuatete, a wood spirit, that was caught "looking through the window into the solid world, paddling at the edges of human dreams" and was corrupted by the rape of Fanny into the one we know today.
  • Orlando is a sadistic demon from Mictlan who has been living for thousands of years and is dangerous enough to require being kept on place by the Aztec gods. When he escaped, Fanny had to be possesed by Tlazoteotl and drain the power from other Gods to finally kill him. It wasn't permanent.
  • The Harlequinnade: Androgynous figures who reside in a parallel dimension, opperate under Blue-and-Orange Morality and seem to possess enough knowledge to control the Hand of Glory. Besides, it is implied they're the ones in charge of the Invisible College.
  • The Blind Chessman is a being who has been living since Biblical times, is implied to have 4D vision, has enough power to hold an important role on the Outer Church and seems to be Satan.
  • All the people modified by the Outer Church. They appear human on the outside, but they have access to uncanny abilities like cancer-preventing nanites, 4D armor and lamprey mouths. Which is normal, considering they have to be able to survive regular encounters with the Archons.
• Hunting the Most Dangerous Game: Sir Miles and his goons routinely dress up in traditional British hunting garb and then go out slaughtering homeless people, then take their corpses and feed them to the Moonchild.
• Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: Or in this case, issue numbering. Volume 3 starts with issue 12 and counts down to 1.
• If You're So Evil, Eat This Kitten!: Initiation into the Outer Church, or at least its upper ranks, requires the initiate to murder a loved one from their civilian life. Sir Miles' kill was his best friend Beryl Wyndham, who was also a powerful Invisibles operative, doubly pleasing the Archons, while Miss Dwyer's was implied to be her own father, judging from her reaction when Key 17 causes her to see a "World's Best Dad" mug as him.
• Journey to the Center of the Mind: In "Entropy in the U.K.".
• Like Cannot Cut Like: One-sidedly. The Outer Church trying to use zombies and death imagery to attack Papa Guedhe was just hilarious. He, on the other hand, is more than capable of hurting them.
• Logic Bomb: The series itself is allegedly designed to have this effect on the reader.
• Mayan Doomsday: The world ends on Dec 21, 2012 with the ascension of mankind. Grant Morrison talks about it here.
• Memory Gambit: Some Invisible agents temporarily submerge their own knowledge of being Invisibles to better blend into the background, such as George Harper.
• Mercy Kill: Several. What the Outer Church does to people is atrocious. Of particular note is the almost gentle one that Papa Guedhe delivers to Miss Dwyer once she has collapsed into My God, What Have I Done?.

• Mind Screwdriver: Anarchy for the Masses, a companion volume that is meant to explain several of the more oblique elements of the series. Also, Douglas Wolk's "Reading Comics" has a very astute analysis.
• Mooks: The Outer Church has two "grades" of faceless henchmen, normal humans called Myrmidons, and modified servitors known as Cyphermen.
• My God, What Have I Done?: Miss Dwyer realizes what a monster she's become when confronted with what she believes is her father.
• Nested Story Reveal:
  • There are at least four instances in the plot that could be interpreted as this: the future Dane's story to his dying friend, the future Robin's self-insert fan fiction, the video game developed by the future King Mob, and the novel written by Sir Miles. However, given the deconstructionist nature of The Invisibles, none of them are conclusive.
  • A major theme of the work is that everything is true. Dane did tell his dying friend the story, Robin did write the story, King Mob did develop a virtual reality game, which Dane played and escaped. The universe of "The Invisibles" exists as a completed totality. "Paradox" is irrelevant.
• Nice to the Waiter: Sir Miles, surprisingly enough. He's usually pretty harsh with his immediate subordinates, but he's actually quite nice to the maid who serves tea and snacks while he's torturing King Mob.
• Nightmare Fetishist: Jim Crow loves it when things get weird and creepy.
• Noodle Incident: The characters constantly refer to what happened in Philadelphia in 1992, where King Mob and John-A-Dreams entered a church and found some weird creatures. King Mob suffered brain injuries, and John disappeared. Aside of that, we never are told exactly what happened. The third volume heavily implies that John found a used timesuit inside the church, and ascended to the fifth dimension, where he becomes a fiction suit for us to experience the story through various POV characters.
• Nothing Is Scarier: The reader never gets a clear look at the human-animal hybrids the Outer Church are creating in their American base, and King Mob and Jolly Roger are so horrified at the sight of them that Mob immediately kills them all. Considering what this series does show, that's saying a lot.
• N-Word Privileges:
  • Jim Crow, a Haitian rapper who named himself after an offensive blackface character from turn-of-the-century Vaudeville shows.
  • Boy's rapper brother Eezy tosses the word around copiously, which annoys their more respectable brother Martin.
    • Boy herself, since "boy" is a mild slur used to refer to an African-American person.
• Obfuscating Disability: The mysterious Blind Chess Player may actually be Satan, Enoch, or another character in the comic itself, but he definitely isn't actually blind. Positively the reverse.
• Order Versus Chaos: The Invisibles are agents of Chaos, fighting the evil forces of eternal Order (represented by the Archons of the Outer Church).
• Our Archons Are Different: The Archons are pandimensional alien gods and the forces behind the Outer Church, appropriately representing malevolent order.
• Our Souls Are Different: Harmony House bottles kids' souls, which resemble pink vapor and are made of feelings like anger or hope.
• Pay Evil unto Evil: Papa Guedhe really messes up those Corrupt Corporate Executives who were terrorizing the ghetto. It was entirely deserved.

• Politically Correct Villain: "Villain" might be a bit of a stretch, but Mictlantecuhtli, despite initially trapping Fanny in his realm, doesn't care about her gender identity.
• Politically Incorrect Villain: The above mentioned executives, who used a crack variant to possess black teens and use them to commit crimes, since "niggers always did the best slaves". And then Jim Crow appears.
• Powers via Possession: Jim Crow does have mystical powers of his own, but when the situation calls for more power than he can muster, he calls upon the Loa Papa Guedhe to "ride" him.
• Punch-Clock Villain: Many. One of the themes of the series is that most villains are this, which means both that they have loved ones, and that even the most ordinary person can commit atrocities, and will in the world of conformity and obedience that the Archons are trying to build.
  • A particularly chilling one is a plump, motherly, middle-aged maid who calmly serves Sir Miles and a Torture Technician tea and snacks as they take a break from torturing a critically-wounded King Mob.
• Putting on the Reich: As the bad guys' master plan reaches its apex, they deck out Westminster Abbey with red and white banners displaying strange designs that are presumably symbols of the Outer Church. Several of them resemble swastikas, and one looks like the Iron Cross as well.
• Rape as Backstory: Parodied when Robin deliberately creates a false memory of being abused by her father as a distraction for the sexually-depraved Quimper, when he tries to Grand Theft Me her.

• Rebellious Rebel: Jack Frost, at first, chafes under even the minimal and fluid authority of an Invisibles cell.
• R-Rated Opening: One of the first series to be written specifically to take advantage of Vertigo's "suggested for mature readers" policy, the second page of the very first issue comic is a splash page with Jack Frost screaming "FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK!".
• Raised as the Opposite Gender: Subverted with Lord Fanny, who ended up being more than happy to identify as a girl anyway.
  • It's strongly implied that even if Fanny's grandmother had wanted to force the matter (and as much of a hardass as Grandma is, there's no sign she's actually abusive, as forcing it would have been), it wouldn't have worked. Fanny had to truly identify as a woman for the spirits to accept her as such. Fortunately for the family line of sorceresses, young Fanny thought the dress that grandma offered her was the most beautiful thing she'd ever seen, and soon everyone almost forgot that she'd ever been a boy...
• Recursive Reality: The cast travels to worlds inside, outside, up, down and sideways to the real world. Whatever that is...
• Round Hippie Shades: Many characters sport these, particularly King Mob and his vanished partner John-a-Dreams, who seems to be based in name and physical appearance on Lennon.
• Secret Identity: Gideon Starozewski wrote books under the name Kirk Morrison about his alter-ego Gideon Stargrave... and eventually became King Mob.
• Secret-Identity Identity: In "Entropy in the U.K.", King Mob uses all of the above identities to fox Lord Miles's attempts at psychic interrogation. In "American Death Camp", Boy discovers that she may not be who she thinks she is.
• Seen It All: When Lord Fanny travels to Mictlan during her shamanic initiation, she reveals to Mictlantecuhtli that she was born male but raised as a girl. His response is, "Do you think the lord of the dead land has never seen the likes of you before, boygirl?"
• Sex Magic:
  • In the "Black Science" arc, Lord Fanny is shown powering one of her spells with masturbation. The Invisibles also includes a rather unusual example in its Para Text: during its early run, the sales of the series dropped notably, and author Grant Morrison (who practices magic in real life) was worried it would get cancelled. To prevent this, they suggested a massive, multi-person "wank-a-thon" on the letters page of one issue. The idea was that all the readers would masturbate on a particular date while focusing on a magical sigil Morrison had provided, and the resultant Sex Magic would stop The Invisibles from getting cancelled. Unfortunately, this particular issue was delayed, so it came out only after the date Morrison had set, though the series was never cancelled anyway.
  • Conversely, the Outer Church is shown to be extremely sex-negative. It's mentioned that all their Mooks are eunuchs, higher-ups such as Dwyer and Gelt are implied to have even nastier things done to their private regions, and Colonel Friday's Motive Rant indicates that all forms of love and passion are among the many things the Archons plan to prohibit once they arrive in our dimension.
• Shout-Out:
  • What does Jim Crow say when fighting the zombies in MI-6? "Bring out your dead!"
  • When harassed by a group of rednecks in volume 2, King Mob says "Is this you, John Wayne? Is this me?"
• Spiritual Antithesis: To The Filth, another metafictional work by Grant Morrison. While The Invisibles covers a group of people, The Filth only centers around Greg Feely. The Invisibles is about an organisation looking to change the status quo while The Filth is an organisation about preserving it. Where The Invisibles is all glamorous and glittery and full of pop, The Filth is dirty, depressing and employs Gallows Humour and Black Comedy. The similarities are so big that lots of people actually theorise that Greg Feely works for another dimension's equivalent of the Outer Church.
• Stylistic Suck: Before becoming an Invisible, King Mob wrote trashy horror/spy novels, the Gideon Stargrave series, starring an Author Avatar of himself.
• Synthetic Plague: Like many conspiracy thrillers, the series reveals that (in-universe) a real-world disease is one of these, with AIDS turning out to be an Outer Church bioweapon meant to exterminate the gay community.
• Technical Pacifist: King Mob gives up guns in volume three because of the damage killing has done to his karma.
• Textual Celebrity Resemblance: The Blind Chessplayer is drawn at times to look exactly like Richard E. Grant. His resemblance to "an actor" is commented on within the story by Dane, after their conversation at Dulce.
• Time Travel: Ragged Robin comes from the year 2012. Also, the team uses psychic time travel regularly, for example to retrieve the Marquis de Sade.
• Took a Level in Kindness: Jack Frost, by the end of the book has considerably mellowed down and is more friendly to all the Invisibles, specially Fanny.
• Trademark Favorite Food: Jim Crow - or Baron Samedi, or both, the line can be blurry - enjoys cake. And the cheapest, nastiest rum you can find.
• Trapped in TV Land: In "Arcadia", the team find themselves stuck in the Marquis de Sade's The 120 Days of Sodom.
• Unintentional Period Piece: Morrison wanted to cram the comic full of popular culture signifiers of its era, which in retrospect makes it very much a 1990s period piece. The '90s phenomena and fads featured in The Invisibles include raves, aliens, virtual reality, baggy pants, Union Jack T-shirts and other clothing styles of the decade, pre-Y2K hysteria, and so on.
• Villain in a White Suit: The series has several creepy and mystically powerful men in white suits, who Grant Morrison has hinted are all on some level the same character: sadistic assassin Orlando, mind-controlling Humanoid Abomination Quimper, enigmatic Wild Card the Blind Chessplayer, and King Mob's ex-partner-turned-evil-(or-maybe-not) John-a-Dreams.
• Weirdness Censor: Used either implicitly or explicitly throughout the series. For example, when the present-day Invisibles travel to Revolutionary France, their contact wonders why nobody is looking at them strangely; King Mob gives a pretty apt summary of this trope as an explanation. It is revealed that babies are capable of seeing all kinds of strange beings and concepts but lose the ability once they learn language, which makes it impossible for them to express these concepts and thus impossible for them to register them in their heads.
• What Measure Is a Mook?: Several times in the comic, but especially in the twelfth issue, which covers the entire life story of a mook who King Mob casually killed in the first issue and gave a Bond One-Liner to.
• When You Snatch the Pebble: during Lord Fanny's shamanic initiation, when she seeks to travel into Mictlan, the land of the dead, she needs the permission of Tezcatlipoca. She seeks out one of his avatars, the "axe of the night," a headless body with two wood-like doors on the front of his chest, which swing open and closed, making a sound like an axe. (This actually seems to be a separate, unrelated creature known as a yoaltepuztli, turned into an avatar of Tezcatlipoca for the comic.) Fanny demonstrates her skill as a shaman by snatching the heart from his chest before the doors trap her hand, which impresses Tezcatlipoca enough that he grants her safe passage to Mictlan.
• Where Everybody Knows Your Flame: The bar where Fanny takes her night off and is captured by Brodie.
• Whole Episode Flashback: "Best Man Fall" tells the life story of one of the guards killed by King Mob in issue one; also "How I Became Invisible", "She-Man", "The Invisible Kingdom".
• Why Couldn't You Be Different?: Subverted. Lord Fanny is raised as a girl because her grandmother does not allow men to become shamans, but she is fully comfortable with this.
• Wild Card: The blind chess player (who may or may not be Satan) appears to be working with both the Invisibles and the Archons. Note that whenever we see him by his chessboard, he's not sitting on either the white or the black side, but in the middle, literally "playing both sides". Later on we find out that the idea of there being two sides is a false dichotomy anyway, and one needs to transcend it to move on to the Supercontext. Or something like that.

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