Invisible Kingdom vol. 1: Walking the Path
G. Willow Wilson got her start doing creator-owned work on titles like the “Cairo” OGN and “Air” at Vertigo before she jumped ship to Marvel and hit it big creating Kamala “Ms. Marvel” Khan. She’s now back at DC writing “Wonder Woman” and preparing to take over “The Dreaming,” but has still found time for doing creator-owned work at Dark Horse’s Berger Books imprint. “Invisible Kingdom,” with artist Christian Ward, is a story about the intersection of faith and commercialism. How one individual and one group from very different walks of life wind up having to rely on each other when the organizations behind them turn out to not be what they thought they were. All of the trappings of a great space opera are here, it’s just a shame that the core story doesn’t quite support them here.
Vess hails from the planet Rool, where she was expected to settle down and pop out a dozen or so babies to help prop up her dying race. Instead, she began a pilgrimage to the planet Duni, home of the followers of the Reunification who have embraced a live that shuns the material excess and temptations of the modern world. Sensing that Vess could be an asset to the group, their Mother Superior makes the girl her new scriptorian. The position is basically that of an accountant and it’s in reviewing the past few years of the Reunification’s records that she stumbles upon something troubling.
It’s something that will eventually tie her to veteran cargo pilot Grix and her crew. Grix flies for the Lux corporation — the biggest one in the galaxy who can sell just about everything to everyone. After something goes wrong with her ship’s coolant system, she’s forced to crash land on a nearby moon. It’s while she’s inspecting her cargo that she makes an unsettling discovery: Some of the Lux product boxes she’s been asked to deliver are empty. Their existence is just a cover for the fact that Lux has been funneling funds to an unknown recipient.
You can probably guess how these things are related and why that’ll cause Grix and Vess’ paths to cross halfway through the volume. While Wilson and Ward certainly take their time getting to a plot point we all knew was going to happen, the journey is still pretty engaging. That’s because the creators do a good job of filling out the world and its characters.
Like its co-protagonists. Vess initially comes off as a naive believer, eager for the spiritual fulfillment offered by the Renunciation. What makes her interesting is that the crisis she stumbles into doesn’t shatter her faith, but winds up reinforcing it without making her seem deluded. Meanwhile, Grix fills the role of the grizzled, veteran pilot who’s seen it all and has learned to expect the worst from everything and everyone. Even if she’s definitely a character type, there’s still some interest in seeing it upended and/or validated by the rest of the cast. Either Vess, Lux liason and romantic partner Eline, and worrisome engineer Xether. It also helps that she’s a damn good pilot with lots of tricks up her sleeve.
Tricks which are rendered very well on the page by Ward. He’s come a long way from delivering chaotic and unappealing work on “The Infinite Vacation” to deliver some frequently gorgeous work here. Each locale in “Invisible Kingdom” is distinct and memorable — from the cold monastery in Duni to the vibrant commercialism of its cities. There’s still some chaos in Ward’s style, which manifests mostly during the multiple spaceflight/fight scenes in the volume. Sometimes they can be hard to follow, but more often than not they’re a thrilling validation of Grix’s piloting skills on the page.
So “Invisible Kingdom” offers an interesting world and characters to populate it. That’s most of what any series needs to succeed. The rest is a plot to drive and give reason to them. This is what the series is missing at the moment. The core conspiracy that unites Vess and Grix was already given away on the inside cover. Not helping matters is what happens when they reveal it to the rest of the galaxy.
The problem with that is, well… Another thing about “Invisible Kingdom” is that it’s meant to be a reflection of our world. At least in the way that you can’t look at the Lux Corporation and not think about Amazon or see the habits of the Renunciation and imagine that it’s a riff on the Catholic Church. There’s nothing wrong with this approach as Wilson clearly has things she wants to say about the here and now through veil of science fiction. It’s just that what she wants to say so far isn’t new, inspiring, angry, or even unconventional enough compared to how I feel about the world right now. Yeah, things are kind of terrible right now. Simply pointing that out again doesn’t really inspire me to do anything about it.
The response at the end of the volume is dangerously close to the figurative equivalent of banging one’s head against a wall while screaming, “MAKE IT BETTER!” That doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence for future volumes. Still, Wilson and Ward do at least the world and characters worth following in spite of the volume’s overall message. So I’ll just close my eyes and think of another creator-owned Dark Horse series that had a very rough start — Helooooo “Mind MGMT” — and managed to deliver a second volume that convinced me to stick around to see how it all turned out.