Like Doctor Manhattan, I am tired of superhero stories. I am tired of being caught in their tangles. But like Doctor Manhattan, I keep being drawn back into them. I’ve watched the newest Spider-man. I watched the (gorgeous, cinematic) Snyder Cut. My giant compendium of Jack Kirby stories is slowly sifting its bookmark through the 1000+ pages. Sadly though, I’m out of passion: nothing on the horizon appeals to me. Since lockdown began I haven’t even been able to impulse buy terrible DC comics at my local comic book store.
Invincible is the new Amazon-funded animated adaptation of a comic by Robert Kirkman, now (and then) most famous for writing The Walking Dead, a lengthy comic and subsequent TV show about a cast of characters escaping from zombie onslaughts. As The Walking Dead is not about superheroes, I’ve never watched or read it, and can offer no further insight.
I’ve also never read Invincible, though I’m loosely aware of it as a mid-2000s example of the kind of hyper-violent adult ‘deconstructions’ of the superhero that Image used to publish all the time. Image now publishes an unyielding array of slightly twee, often still violent indie comics and the busy work of making loose analogues of treasured characters from your youth do hate crimes is now handled in-house by the big two, Marvel and DC.
I’m also aware that Invincible’s animated adaptation has been fairly well received, spawning one (1) successful meme and lots of hushed, maybe even muted praise. My stance going into this could best be described as skeptical. I’m struggling to think what an animated adaptation of a comic from the mid-2000s could possibly have to say as regards ‘deconstructing superheroes’ that wasn’t screamed until throats were hoarse in the mid-2000s. Or the mid-1980s. It’s not-so-much “not fertile ground” as it is a barren wasteland of ossified pop culture remains, a salt plain devoid of all but the most transitive life.
So what happened is, I saw a tweet — just a joke floating in the aether, I won’t link it — where someone was berating a (possibly fictional) friend of theirs for accidentally watching the show, which is apparently full of tense, dramatic twists and revelations, in reverse episode order. Starting with the climax and working backwards, like you used to be able to do before TV got all these pretensions towards serial narrative.
I thought “I’m going to do that.” I’m unlikely to watch the show otherwise and the thought of deliberately mashing up the structure of one of those shows where people implore you to “go in blind” appeals hugely to my irritating, antagonistic contrarian nature. This is what we mean, properly, when we say that the experience of art is subjective: some people out there are just deliberately doing it wrong, purely to screw with you, and because of that nothing gets to be objectively true ever again.
So I took a weekend and watched each episode in turn, backwards, and wrote up my thoughts. And here we are.
Episode List:
