Why Invincible is still a blast to watch even in the age of superhero fatigue

Next week, the Amazon Prime Video show Invincible will return for a second season. Based on Robert Kirkman’s comic book of the same name, Invincible is superhero show. The second season involves the multiverse. But wait, don’t go! It’s not boring. Although Invincible has many of the hallmarks of your standard superhero story, it’s somehow managed to stand out in a world flooded by Marvel and DC movies and TV shows. Kirkman (who also created The Walking Dead, another comic book-to-TV success story) talked to Variety about how that could be.

“From my perspective — which I admit, probably wrong! — is that I don’t get that sense of newness anymore from these movies,” Kirkman said. “For the first 10 years, it was like, Oh my gosh, we’re getting everything we loved about action movies, but instead of watching Bruce Willis climb through ventilation duct, we’re watching a guy punch a planet. It was taking the magic of superhero comics that had existed for decades, and authentically translating it into film in a way that had never really been achieved before. Now that we’re, you know, 100 movies deep, it’s hard to tell an audience, ‘You’re going to get a new experience out of this.'”

"Hopefully, [Invincible is] arriving at the exact right time. “Invincible” came around in comics when superhero-literate people knew exactly how superhero stories go. “Invincible’s” main goal was to say, “You think you know what superheroes do?” And the comic became very popular because of that. And so “Invincible” [the show] is coming at a time when the general audience is extremely superhero literate. So hopefully [we can re-create] the same thing that happened in comics, where people who had been reading Marvel and DC comics for years were like, “Wait, ‘Invincible’ makes me feel like when I first started reading comics.”"

So far so good, at least if you ask me. I was very impressed with how the first season of Invincible seemed to be subversive and straightforward at the same time. If you look at the plot, it doesn’t sound like anything revolutionary. Teenager Mark Grayson, the son of the superhero Omni-Man, finds out he has superpowers and adopts the name Invincible. Sounds pretty standard, but the show sets itself apart in the details.

Maybe that’s because Invincible doesn’t shy away from, for example, storylines where Mark goes to Mars for an episode where astronauts are kidnapped by Martians, and other offbeat plots like that. “One of the secret sauces of Invincible is that we embrace everything about superhero comics. There’s a distillation that happens with the MCU, where they shave the edges off to make everything as real world as possible,” Kirkman said. “Like, you’re never going to see Robert Downey Jr. having a conversation with a fish person in the MCU. To me, the tradition of comic books is, you know, there was an issue of Superman where he had to marry a mermaid. I like the weird stuff, and people seem to respond to that.”

Invincible doesn’t “shave the edges off” off superhero comics like the MCU does

When Kirkman says “I like the weird stuff,” that’s not just him giving his opinion; that’s his guiding philosophy. By the sound of it, whatever happens in Invincible happens because he wants it to happen, rather than because of focus testing from a Kevin Feige-like overboss. “For the most part, I’m just trying to entertain myself,” Kirkman said. “I do consider the audience. But my main driving force is, do I like this? In that respect, I just kind of do what I think is cool, and then hope that people like it. But from everything I’ve heard back, it seemed to be fairly effective. So it’s been kind of full steam ahead on Season 2.”

All the same, there are times when what Kirkman finds cool overlap with what Marvel is doing that moment. For instance, Invincible season 2 introduces a new villain named Angstrom Levy (Sterling K. Brown), a brilliant scientist who can access the multiverse. Marvel has been all about the multiverse for a few years now; just watch Loki to see what I mean. So does that mean people will be bored by the focus on the multiverse in Invincible season 2?

In his defense, Kirkman points out that when the Invincible comics introduced Angstrom Levy, “there was barely anything going on with the multiverse.” (The Invincible comics started running in 2003.) “The draw of the multiverse is that you get to play with different aspects of familiar things. It’s just a really easy button to push: ‘OK, we can bring in these Fox characters that everybody remembers. We can have a digital cameo of Christopher Reeve. We’re going to take this thing that’s popular because it’s a nostalgia thing and then amp the nostalgia up even more.’ I consider myself in that fanbase, so I see why it’s so popular.”

"The only thing I’ll say is, what we’re doing is a little bit different. We’re using the multiverse to examine Mark’s character and what aspects of him we may not necessarily be aware of yet. It’s much more of a character-based story. I mean, we don’t have the luxury of bringing in the Invincible from the popular 1990s cartoon. If we did, we probably would."

If you’ve had too much of the multiverse, you can at least rest assured that Mark’s battle with Angstrom Levy probably won’t spill very far beyond the bounds of the second season. Unlike the comic, which has storylines that ran for years from one issue to the next, Kirkman and his writing team are trying to give each season of the show a distinct arc, while still keeping the longer continuity in mind. “The first season was a matter of putting those two big Nolan beats of him fighting the Guardians of the Globe, and him fighting Mark, as the bookends, and filling out the middle,” Kirkman said. “This season was about making it definitively Mark’s story, and Angstrom Levy is definitively a Mark villain that he had to face on his own. It gave us that structure for this season. The same thing is true of Season 3. That’s a lot of fun for me. Anything that’s new and different about the story is where I perk up.”

Invincible creator wants to release one new season per year, more or less

If you’re wondering, yes, Invincible season 3 is a go. In fact, the voice actors have already recorded their parts. “I had an actor who was like, ‘Good luck! I hope it comes back for a second season!’ And I was like, ‘Well, you were recording for Season 3 … but … OK!'” Kirkman recalled.

Going forward, Kirkman is hoping to roll out new seasons of Invincible at a rate of one per year. “The realities of animation may make that a little difficult, but what I can guarantee is that the gap between Season 1 and 2 is the longest gap we should ever have, you know, barring some unforeseen catastrophe. It may be every 18 months or 16 months or 13 months or every 12 months. We’re still trying to figure that out.”

As for how long the show can last, the comic ran for 18 years and 144 issues, so we could be here for a while. That will require some adaptation choices. “My main goal is to keep the skeleton intact,” Kirkman said. “We have hindsight with Invincible that we didn’t have on The Walking Dead, because I was writing that while we were doing the show, so we wouldn’t know that one character is important four years later, because I hadn’t written those issues yet. But here, it’s down to the point where it’s like, that line of dialogue is going to have a bigger punch if we tweak it a little bit, because we know what we would theoretically be adapting in Season 6.”

"But while keeping the skeleton intact, the goal is to take what’s in the comics and enrich and deepen it. [Mark’s mother] Debbie wasn’t the biggest character in the comics, and that’s a unique perspective that’s more relatable to the audience because she has no superpowers. Her story is interesting because of everything that’s happening with her husband and her son and her being at the center of this insane world. And then we also have Sandra Oh, who is spectacular, playing her. So a lot of plots come from, “OK, well, what are we doing with Debbie that we didn’t do in the comics?”"

In addition to the TV show, Kirkman is also involved in a live-action Invincible movie, although he cautions that it’s “[s]till in the script development stage…There’s a lot of work that needs to be done. But we’re hopeful.”

Invincible season 2 will premiere on Amazon Prime Video on Friday, November 3. Episodes will come out one per week after that. There are only four episodes in this first batch, but we’ll get more before too long.

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