(Spoilers of the first four issues below, but the first four issues really don't spoil much of anything, themselves acting as a kind of preview. And much has been left out of this summary.)
Dane McGowan is a long-haired blond kid from Liverpool whose interests include stealing cars and running them into ditches, and setting his school building on fire with various crude explosives. He's in the midst of the latter when he's apprehended, and sent to a very strange correctional facility for boys, called Harmony House. The folks who run Harmony House claim openly that they will turn their charges into hollow shells who will thank Harmony House for teaching them what authority really means. Dane, of course, goes sneaking around and finds some rather nasty remnants of the House's former clients. An alarm sounds, and he's caught by the headmaster, Mr. Gelt, a corpulent ghoul in a dark suit and darker glasses. He alludes repeatedly that he may have a changed sort of sight, and with Dane cornered and his establishment caught red-handed, he prophesies what Dane will become, like himself: "smooth between the ears, smooth between the legs". Nothing short of an armed rescue team could save Dane now. This is when he meets some new friends.
King Mob is a fury in shock white hair, a curious diving-mask thing, and an even more curious black vinyl jacket that looks like it's had little black-vinyl Dixie cups glued to it all over. He tears into Harmony House, its staff, and finally its headmaster, with handguns and your basic contemporary-action-hero kung fu. He hauls Dane the hell out of there and barely has time to explain that he's the leader of a cell within the secret society known as the Invisibles and Dane is their newest recruit, before he disappears, leaving Dane alone and homeless on the streets of London.
Mad Tom is a beggar, looking every bit the part with his army-surplus gear and wizardly grey beard, muttering a pastiche of literature and rhythmic chant. Dane is getting by on shoplifted snacks and has made a couple of nice gutter-punk friends, who tell him Tom's harmless but annoying, and can be safely ignored. Later that same day, Tom snatches Dane as he runs from the police, and pulls him into an alley. The bobbie questions Tom about Dane's whereabouts, gets no sensible answer, and moves on - while Dane stands beside Tom in plain view for the entire exchange. So, Dane reasons, something interesting's going on with this Tom fellow. Tom O'Bedlam, as he further explains himself, claims to be the world's most powerful living magician, and out of disbelieving cussedness and fascination, Dane deigns to follow him around for a while.
Soon, Dane is seeing the city with different eyes - literally. Tom takes him from an abandoned tube stop with strange graffiti (where Dane could swear he goes somewhere very, very else for a bit, but can't quite remember), to a park bench where Tom feeds some pigeons, the better to pop out Dane's eyes for a second and swap them with those of a bird that flies all through London and can somehow see the other side of the city, the true self that Tom's been conjuring on and off, the darkened steel lifeform that shits blood and money into the Thames and pools its power into great pyramidal towers that hide in plain sight. The city is a virus, says Tom, using humans to replicate itself for purposes understood only by machines and control systems, until there is no more chaos to consume and the hosts build flying building-ships to carry the building virus to new resources.
In between magical trips and shenanigans, Tom and Dane chat about the nature of reality, the Invisibles, and their war against "the dark forces that would rule this planet." Dane absorbs all this information the only way he can - with a Liverpool street kid's skepticism and lots of cursing. It takes a visit to the seaside, and a couple of preternaturally powerful socks to the jaw, to break Dane's armor. Tom chokes and half-drowns the boy, forcing him to face the gaping hole inside him, which takes the shape of the blank badge of the Invisibles, which engulfs the page in white until nothing's left.
Dane wakes flat on his back on wet sand, staring. "It's like E but it's like... real or something... I feel fucking amazing, man..." Tom is still there waiting, even as he makes ominous noises about his own approaching end. He suggests that he and Dane take a flying leap - off the silver-pyramid-topped tallest tower in Britain. After a bit of frisbee and Dane's blowing up the sports car they rode in on, the two find themselves fifty stories above old London holding rolled-up newspaper torches above their heads. Dane has second thoughts. "You won't die," Tom shouts above the wind, "you're young, with your whole life ahead of you. ... You never trusted anyone in your life before. Trust me. Jump out of the dream." Somehow Tom leads them, they jump together, Dane's lost his torch, Tom falls like Jesus on the cross, they're still so high falling looking down and then Dane hits the ground, but it's the wrong ground, in some countryside. He tumbles a few yards down a grassy hill, between trees. There's little but a queer featureless horizon... he catches his breath for a moment, and what confronts him but the entity we will come to know as Barbelith. It seems to accept him but he turns and runs, finds a bike and a country lane like something out of The Wizard of Oz, rides for a while with little-kid glee and comes to a stop only when the sky in front of him fills with a vision of what looks like the planet Saturn, huge like a Times Square billboard. Tears stream down his face.
Turn the page and find Dane on the streets of London again, grim-faced. He's seeking out the address that Tom gave him on a little slip of paper before the jump. He walks up into the second-floor safehouse, where he finds an empty classroom, and a chalkboard easel that reads "BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU." Soon, he's met again by King Mob, who doesn't have a good answer when confronted about the whereabouts of Tom. Ragged Robin, who is nuts, and tells Dane as much before she's said three sentences to him (and who, the vigilant reader will note, bears not a little resemblance to Crazy Jane from Grant Morrison's run writing Doom Patrol!), isn't any help either. Dane also meets Boy and Lord Fanny, his other soon-to-be teammates, and realizes they've been tailing him throughout his whole ordeal.
There isn't much time to argue about it, though, as Robin's psychic talents detect an incoming goon squad, and they've got to head out in a hurry. Dane can only chase after them, still not knowing what the hell he's gotten into. The other side's storm troops bust down the door of the classroom to find it empty - only now with two phrases on the blackboard (the second: "LEARN TO BECOME INVISIBLE"), and, sitting on the desk in place of an apple, a hot pink hand grenade - no pin - bearing the ransom-note legend: SMILE.
This grossly simplified, somewhat inaccurate summary of issues 1 through 4 of Grant Morrison's The Invisibles has none of the richly textured, double-meaning prose, side trips through semiotics, or beautiful artwork of the real thing. If the above interests you at all, you'd be well advised to pick up the trade paperback collection Say You Want A Revolution, still in print, and find out what happens when the team trips merrily back in time to recruit the Marquis de Sade. Not to mention the just-collected history of Lord Fanny and his/her bruja matriarchy, our chief baddie Sir Miles, Division X, and much more...