Nightmare Fuel / The Invisibles

This is what you get when you gaze at the abyss

The Invisibles is one of the most surreal and graphic series in Vertigo comics. When you deal with alien omnidimensional gods, shadowy conspiracies, assasins and artifacts of doom, Nightmare Fuel is to be expected

Spoilers below.

• The Archons. Dear God, the Archons. Imagine huge... things existing in a higher reality than ours and with more dimensions than we could ever think of. These demons have enough power to entirely reconfigure our reality by merely existing inside it. And they want to break into our world and create Hell on Earth, turn the entire concept of existence in an authoritarian joyless death camp and "rob [them] of everything that cannot be measured, weighed and counted" out of sheer spite. Everything about them is unnatural: They speak in weird blurry captions with typos, their art style is far more jagged and angular than all the other members and they look like humanoid shadows. Have we mentioned that they give skin cancer to everyone who is nearby and hasn't been turned into a cyborg?
  • Since they're too complex and multidimensional to enter our lower reality, the Archons created the Outer Church, an extradimensional organization that has subdivisions on Earth dedicated to controlling everything and adapt and prepare the world for the arrival of the Archons. The earthly Outer Church is composed of polititians, policemen, religious figures, the Military, secret organizations such as MI5, tv figures and Elizabeth II. Imagine all the powerful forces on Earth working together to make sure we will lose all sense of happiness, hope or any feeling and turn us into thoughtless machines that follow what their Lord Archons say.
    • Oh, and the initiation for the Outer Church involves killing someone you love or you care to prove your blind obedience.
• The high ranks of the Outer Church are all fascist sociopaths Jerkass Woobies in their own right, and most of them have been turned into cyborgs so they can withstand the presence of the Archons, in some cases turning them into borderline humanoid abominations.
  • Sir Miles Delacourt. Sir Miles is the director of MI5 and one of the Outer Church's most trusted men, if such beings can even feel trust. Throughout the series, Delacourt is portrayed as a key player in the global conspiracy, working behind the scenes to manipulate events and shape the world according to the Outer Church's agenda. Not only that, he supervises the Moonchild's coronation, and he feeds it by hunting homeless people. During the course of the series, he begins to doubt the Archons and seems to show regret of what he has done. And then Mr. Six forces him to commit suicide.
    • Even worse, Sir Miles seems to have been a beatnik at one point, but during a series of Project MKULTRA-like experiments with LSD his visions lead him to believe that at the end of history "the Machine" wins, and ultimately there are no other choices than being slave or master.
  • Colonel Friday. Friday claims to be the first being the Outer Church turned into a cyborg in '45. He is a high ranking military officer who's the chief of the Dulce hidden station in New Mexico, a high-tech laberyntic futuristic underground city that houses hyper-advanced technology, factories for humanoid abominations, gods and the vaccine for AIDS. He uses Quimper and a "Scorpio machine" to install fear and paranoia and distrust on minds. And if you think he's bad in a human form, wait until he puts a weird, 4D liquid black armour that turns his mouth into that of a lamprey. Did we mention, despite all this, that he is one of the less effective members of the Outer Church and is ultimately killed for his incompetence?
  • Ms. Dwyer: A modified servant of the Archons, initially appears as an administrator at Harmony House. She later pays an unexpected visit to Sir Miles while he's torturing King Mob. Dwyer is a "high priestess to the Archons" and the only character we're specifically told outranks Sir Miles. She has disgusting blue veins that carry the technology necessary to not die from skin cancer when in front the Archons, and forces Sir Miles to drink from her blue breasts. It says something when even Delacourt is intimidated and creeped out by the lady.
  • Although we don't see much of him, Mr. Gelt is a fat pedophilic bastard who's conducting brainwashing in young thugs and eventually reincarnates in a fly.
  • The Myrmidon in general, since they wear creepy dominatrix outfits and follow blindly the orders of their masters.
• Fucking Orlando. He is a demon from Mictlan ^note  Essentially, Aztec Hell. who escaped and believes himself to be Xipo Totec, goddess of fertility that demands its sacrifices to be skinned and worn by the priests. His first apppearence is him having just murdered a family (including the kids) and playing "Pop goes to weasel" while wearing their skin as a mask. He later tortures Dane and cuts his finger before being vanished once again to Hell by Fanny. He would later reappear during the coronation of the Moonchild, but was once again killed.
  • Fridge Horror applies here. Orlando is inmortal and has escaped Mictlan at least twice. What's stopping him from escaping once more.
• The Moonchild is a grotesque monster who lives inside a mirror. It regularly comes outside to eat the bodies of homeless people, but aside of that it doesn't do much. Coincidentally, it's a blend of human and Archon DNA designed to be the host for the King Archon, and once he is coronated King of England the Rex Mundi will finally arrive on Earth and turn it into the Archon's own dystopian playground. It is implied it was supposed to look human, but, since he originally should have married Lady Diana but she commited suicide, he now resembles a mix between Cthulu and Man-Thing. That being said, the Moonchild appears Ambiguously Evil, since he barely does nothing else than eat and sleep and might very well just be a flesh suit for the King Archon to wear.
• Quimper used to be a ciuatete/tepicoton, an Aztec wood sprite who, during a visit on Earth was kidnapped, drugged and crucified during Fanny's rape and became what it is today: An obese and deformed goblinesque creature who infects bad memories "like a parasite" and exploits them until they become all its victim thinks, and they surrender to Quimper's control to make the memories stop. Quimper possessed a (fake) memory of Ragged Robin being molested by her father and attempted to control her, but was ultimately tricked by Fanny, who gave him a very polite The Reason You Suck speach and made him vanish into thin air.
• King Mob's torture sequence. Imagine being locked inside a bunker and being tortured for who knows how long both physically, psychologically and spiritually by a high-ranking cult leader and his Torture Technician. King Mob, usually cool and calmed, suddenly breaks down and begins crying and begging for help (Although it's later revealed he's actually a cover personality while the real KM prepares his psychic defenses). Not helped is the fact that KM is dosed with Key 64, a substance that makes words appear as reality. Gideon is hallucinating his fingers being mutilated and his face disfigured beyond repair, and much worse.
  • Morrison actually suffered from a puncuated lung and blood poisoning while writting this sequence. Even if you don't believe in the paranormal, it is still an eerie coincidence.
• Lord Fanny's rape. Imagine arriving a house full of men in animal masks who are then told they can do whatever they want to you and then proceed to exactly that while simultaneously shooting a woman in the head and brutally beat and rape you. That's not even getting into the forest spirit who they have crucified in the same room. The poor spirit is so traumatized and twisted by it he becomes Mr. Quimper.
• Boy's deprogramming. She is kidnapped by an Invisible cell who are disguides as members of the Outer Church and sistematically make her doubt everything she believes in a gigantic Mind Screw, to the point she thinks she is an insect-human hybrid designed as an inside women on the Invisible College. She is forced to almost kill King Mob before finally overcoming the brainwashing. The poor woman is so scared she quits the Invisibles.
• Jim Crow, although an Invisible and freedom fighter is still a Blood Knight who's the vessel for the Haitian Loa Papa Ghede and has to feed him with death. He is absolutley brutal in battle and once almost killed all the south east coast just for the thrill of it. He is probably the most amoral of all the Invisibles. Luckily for us, he seems more interested in wolfing cake and singing than destroying planet Earth.
  • The victims of Unitol Pharmaceuticals. Not only are they dealing with the loss of their loved ones from a drug over dose, but those same loved ones are then possessed by the bored of directors and raised as zombies for no other purpose but to rape and murder the zombie's family members. The reason they do all of this? a combination of Racism and the sheer rush of it. Jim gives them a well-deserved (although brutal) commupence by brainwashing them and turning them into a Blackface Ministrel Show that eat alive its newest recruit.
• The ending of the series is pretty uncanny in its own right. It includes the universe (and it's implied the timeline too) vaporizing into thin air, all the characters vaporizing into thin air, it's full of cryptic phrases like "do you feel as though time's speeding up, darling? I mean, actually getting faster" and weird images of a japanese tea cereomony, some parts of the narration are just gibberish (or maybe it's in a three-dimensional translation of a 64 letter alphabet ) and in the end, Dane breaks the fourth wall. According to Grant it's supposed to look like a dream.