10 DC Graphic Novels You Must Read Before You Die

2. The Invisibles

DC ComicsThe wildest, coolest, most psychedelic, punk rock, post-modern, anti-everything comic EVER produced, The Invisibles remains (for our money, at least) the best thing that Grant Morrison has yet written in his long and storied career. Put simply, The Invisibles is just beyond awesome. Beginning on the grimy streets of Liverpool, the story twists and turns into a manic fusion of pop art, classic literature, contemporary culture and the occult, with meditations on politics, sex, philosophy, terrorism, drugs, time travel, conspiracy theories and the nature of reality casually thrown in for good measure. Plus, it has a motherfungler of a plot twist at the end. Despite a somewhat slow start, the story goes on to successfully encompass just about everything you€™ve ever thought of (and a good deal more that you€™ve probably never thought of). There will be some reading this that won€™t understand (as bemoaned by the living creatures within language itself that are seen in one of the series€™ most fascinating panels) and there will be others still who will find this series to be the equivalent of vigorously rubbing their exposed brains with a ghost chilli. To those people, we apologise in advance. For the rest of you, welcome to the fold. This story is also part of a real world occult experiment, as Grant Morrison created the character of King Mob to be a €˜fiction suit€™ for himself and a lot of the events that occur in the story were incited as part of Morrison€™s ritual €˜chaos magic€™ experiments. It also reached out and influenced the real world in other ways, too, becoming a primary influence on The Matrix movies and the music of The Mars Volta as well as more action movies and comic book series than there is space to name here. If William Burroughs had written a comic book on the side during his Naked Lunch, this is likely what he would have come up with.