Invisible Kingdom #1 - Berger Books/Dark Horse Comics
Written by G. Willow Wilson
Art & Colors by Christian Ward
How much stuff have you ordered from Amazon this year? There's a chance that sometimes, you have boxes come to your house and you have no idea what's in them or what you ordered. I'm certainly guilty of that at times. Instead, maybe you're someone who takes a more minimalist approach. Invisible Kingdom, in a way, looks at both sides of that. Toss in some science fiction, religious themes and a vast conspiracy while you're at it. Let's talk about what's going on here.
This story walks two paths, one of those literally. First we have a freighter pilot named Grix who is having trouble with the ship that is carrying orders for a company named Lux. It seems like Lux is this world's version of Amazon, but with less competition and more control. The crew of this ship has a company liaison, who seems only concerned with the cargo and not the ship or crew that is very much in distress. Something happens that will cause a major delay but also lead to an interesting discovery.
While all of this is going on, we also follow another named Vess. We learn that Vess has traveled quite a long way from home to walk the path to the Invisible Kingdom. Vess wants to join a group of Nones (not nuns, and not a type), which means giving up everything to follow this path. This isn't the most welcoming group, aside from Mother Proxima who appears to be the head None. Mother Proxima has taken quite an interest in Vess, for reasons that I will not reveal here. Vess gets a very important job, but also makes a discovery that could dramatically change how she feels about this current path.
There really wasn't much that I could say without spoiling anything, but I wasn't being that vague on purpose. A lot of this story is very vague at times. I also tried to use gender neutral terms here for a reason. While it seems like this story's main characters are women (Grix has a child), Vess' world has four genders so that is an assumption that I did not want to make. In some ways these two couldn't be more different, but fundamentally they might be more similar than we realize in this first issue. You are going to get a lot of setup here in this first issue, especially with Vess, but not a whole lot of information. You will definitely get a hook, and a sense of what may be going on, but it's up to you to decide if that hook interests you. I'm certainly intrigued, but it's the reactions of these main characters that I think interests me more. If things play out the way that I expect them to, I'll be interested to see just how much things could start to unravel for them. The art by Ward is very eye catching, but I think the colors here are the star of the show. It reminds me of reading Low from Image Comics. Sometimes I would just get lost on a certain page looking at all of the colors around me. Invisible Kingdom has potential, but I think that Issue 2 is key here. G. Willow Wilson is a great story teller, so I trust that we are going to have a big payoff coming up there. This is definitely a review I will be updating on a future podcast when the next issue drops. Keep an ear out for it.
RATING: PICK UP