Just Watched Invincible...Excellent or Reprehensible?

Due to a friend’s suggestion, I finally caught the first season of Invincible on Amazon Prime’s streaming service. For those unfamiliar with the show, it’s an animated superhero series that begins rather conventionally with a band of flamboyant do-gooders fighting some larger-than-life villains. The team is an obvious parallel to DC’s Justice League with its Flash, Wonder Woman, and even Plastic Man facsimiles. But the most prominent hero in Omni-Man, a thinly-guised Superman knockoff who is practically invincible and beloved by the world. But unbeknownst to everyone, he hides a duplicitous, devious secret.

The series isn’t really about him, though. Rather, it focuses on his son Mark Grayson, a teenager who’s just discovered he has powers of his own and, like dad, wants to use them for good (and maybe some fun). Coining himself “Invincible,” he blunders through alien invasions and random bad guys as he adapts to his new abilities, all the while learning what being a superhero truly means—and what the life of such a being truly entails. In short, he’s in for a lot of sacrifice and self-defeating disappointment.

None of this is exactly groundbreaking storytelling, but Invincible employs an extra trick to attract its audience: unapologetic shock value. Despite being a seemingly bright, fun-loving, coming-of-age tale about a boy superhero, it’s really a story of gross betrayal and misplaced loyalties, of broken hearts and untimely ends. Grayson’s world seems colorful and innocent in the classic Silver Age style, but that’s only a starched facade. Viewers will quickly bristle at the show’s truer, darker nature, treated not only to hefty body counts…but to enough body parts, blood, and bone to make a slasher movie blush. It’s akin to watching something like Disney’s Bambi only to suddenly see the mother deer’s head blown off in the most gruesome, graphic fashion, brain parts and all. It’s shocking. It’s raw. A bit unnecessary. A little odd.

And very much the product of Robert Kirkman.

Although the scribe for the Invincible comic book from which the show is derived, Kirkman is more known for The Walking Dead, his apocalyptic zombie saga famous for its extreme scenes of human brutality. Violence is this man’s forte. His fetish and his fervor. And he brings it here by the body bags, tarnishing the almost clinically-clean streets of Grayson’s world with his specific brand of nihilistic villainy and sadistic intent. Forget sexy women and exploitative sensuality; Kirkman is more about exploitative gore, meshing Silver Age silliness with overwrought splatter. Less thigh and breast, more blood and ripped flesh. More streets lined in entrails and rubble glazed in red.

The squeamish won’t like Invincible. And, honestly, fans of the Batman: The Animated Series, or the best Justice League Unlimited and Young Justice stories, won’t find anything particularly new or compelling in Kirkman’s deconstructive retreads, either. What they will find is a lot of shock and a lot of schlock.

But mixed with the right twists, the right subversive turns—both of which Kirkman is king at delivering—Invincible still has enough of its own identity to be entertaining. But otherwise, Invincible is nothing but an “adult,” gross-out version of the Justice League or Teen Titans…mimicking and subverting, but never redefining.--D

Omni-Man and the Guardians of the Globe. (Read: Superman and the Justice League.)

Invincible (on left) talking to blood-splattered dad.