Tag: Comics Criticism

This is the eighth and final in a series of episode reviews for the animated TV show Invincible, starting from the end and working backwards. See the overview here.

Last time the show was tidying things up in anticipation of the big… beginning?

And so the clock ticks back round to the midnight position. Here we are in the first episode, and handily (for the purpose of writing a series of reviews backwards) it is itself a mix of beginnings and endings. I was more surprised than anything by how little the scene of ultra-violence at the end of the episode can be called a ‘twist’. The comparisons to Watchmen have ultimately been thematic rather than direct as I’ve gone through the series, but I think there’s something here in how the episode plays out deterministically — from the moment we’re introduced to the Guardians of the Globe there’s a palpable sense of sand moving through the hour-glass. These are not our characters, they receive precisely enough characterisation so that we know their skill set and we vaguely empathise with them, and not a moment more. The fight scene itself is almost perfunctory, the result a foregone conclusion, happening as it does post-credits. This was all done 35 minutes ago.

There are the parts I didn’t anticipate, like the vague unease with which the Guardians treat Omni-man as their unofficial extra member. There’s some very effective cinematography making sure that Omni-man’s appearance on the White House lawn is a little bit off, a little bit tense. The Immortal, last seen dug out of a grave and howling Omni-man’s name, seems like a complete asshole in the minor interactions with him we see. At least in terms of Omni-man, however, he is correct — his naked distrust as he pauses to check that Omni-man is bothering to catch the airborne people he’s hurling is impossible to read any other way, even if we didn’t know the twist.

What is interesting is the sense, through the whole episode, that it’s Mark gaining his powers that has set this whole affair in motion. That Omni-man had plans long laid that have been brought into action as a result of needing to teach his son the Saiyan ways. It’s almost a shame this isn’t vocalised in the finale, unsubtle as the show is in most other ways. Puberty is a traumatic experience that can feel like it is completely destabilising the world around you — imagine if it really was. Omni-man, for his part, is not being very smart at all. His long-term plan for the child was clearly thought up around the time we see him give the puberty talk and little revised since; when he does speak the whole truth in episode 8, it’s an earlier Omni-man speaking. He can’t hold true to those principles himself any more, and ultimately doesn’t, flying off.

I wish there were more scenes with Debbie and Mark in the show, although to some extent what we get here sets the entire tone — there’s more of her in him than his father, and that’s going to make him completely unreceptive to the fascist rhetoric his father will pitch him with.

The Immortal’s distasteful persona is perhaps foreshadowing Rex’s participation in the New Guardians — and the general disfunction that that team will have in both their professional and personal lives. I don’t think it’s ever mentioned after this episode that Guardians HQ is in the side of a mountain; I’d been imagining a Justice League-esque Watchtower satellite this entire time. There’s some thematic purpose here — Cecil is notably fond of being able to place awkward people in subterranean pits to get rid of them, between the Guardian HQ, the prison where the cloners were being kept, and his sending the Rorschach demon back to ‘Hell’.

In the other direction, Mark pauses briefly to look over the city, enamoured with his newfound flight, and sits on the end of a crane in what is probably not a refence to Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, but that’s certainly what it brought forward for me. Tom Cruise’s character, a crane operator, is spatially mirrored with the invading Martian tripods in his position up high above the city, and through the film learns to care for his family rather than his oblique idea of ‘protecting’ them. Mark’s arc through Invincible is not dissimilar, though obviously the perspective is shifted. His father, Omni-man, actively tries to see the world from the perspective of the crane. Every time Mark tries to intervene from on high however, he comprehensively fucks it up.

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Some final notes on the episode itself, I did have a little laugh realising the extremely hammy visuals of the Saiyan planet from episode 8 were a direct parody of the harmonious visions in this first one. Getting the blood out of those pure white bodysuits must be hell. And as metaphors go, Mark leaving a crator every time he lands is extremely on-the-nose — he will continue to do that, metaphorically or literally, all the way to the final episode of the season.

A small thing, but the connected cold opens in this episode and the next were extremely charming, another dead-on throwback to the style of serialised superhero cartoons like Batman: The Animated Series, the episode-local supporting cast who get painted in the broadest strokes — “I can’t connect with my son!”/”Thank God I’ve finally connected with my son!”. For a series which ultimately hinges on an argument about whether the lives of the ‘little people’ matter, those non-superhero types are phased out as the series goes on. As well, a welcome early appearance for Titan, the man with stone for skin from episode 5, who I liked so much that just seeing him here improved my impression of this one.

The act of watching the episodes backwards, arbitrary as it was, ended up highlighting the Watchmen comparisons more than anything. We started in episode 8 with Dr Manhattan leaving the earth, then wound back to episode 7 to see that the world’s most intelligent man poses no more threat than the world’s most intelligent ant. Then back to episode 4 where we see Rorschach leave his journal, and all the way back here in the first episode we have what is effectively the Comedian being murdered. As I mentioned in the write-up of episode 4, I think one of the modern developments in comic superheros is that all of the heroes, in their complicity with the state, are akin to the Comedian. And so here we are with them all dying like the Comedian. The only act of heroism we see the Guardians do is defending the White House lawn, casting them as stronger, more mobile versions of the mounted guns that here line the White House roof. We want Omni-man to be brought to justice for their murder, of course, but my prevailing thought as the credits rolled was ‘good riddence’.

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I wasn’t expecting to like Invincible, but obviously in the end I did. This is maybe not that surprising — it’s pulling from DC’s animated series, which I was always fond of, and from Buffy which was also a strong influence on Justice League and Justice League Unlimited. Watchmen, as well, obviously. The gravity of Watchmen in this area is best captured by the decision to include a Rorschach character in the show, a role so unsuited to the modern-day setting that he had to be gratuitously shoved through a door halfway through the season. Overall, what struck me most was the way in which the show seamlessly integrates the kind of totalising military presence which has been made default by the Marvel movies, with shadowy state actors directing and influencing a crowd of superheros who are somewhere between private military contractors and celebrity influencers. In a world of near-universal surveillance, everyone is always watching the Watchmen.

I’m a little wary, rewatching the episode 8 ending montage, of where all this galactic nonsense is going to go. Seth Rogan’s character seems to me like a harbinger of some kind of eternal space liberalism, where we fly away from Earth to find out while we might be under threat from the space facists, there’s a well-meaning group of participants in space republic who, while they may be inefficient, mean well and want to help out. I’m worried that it will turn out that for all its mooted cynicism, this will be another world where there’s always a bigger parent to cry to.

But accordingly, and in final conclusion, I award the show the highest honour I am capable of bestowing: I’d probably watch a second season.

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Final ranking, from best to worst:

1. #5
2. #8
3. #4
4. #7
5. #1
6. #2
7. #3
8. #6

Evidently I preferred the second half of the season, though that might just be a necessary outcome of having a bunch of tedious world-building to get out of the way. That said, I certainly managed without it. Ultimately #6 was the only episode I’d consider bad outright, with #5 and #8 the obvious standouts.

This is the seventh in a series of episode reviews for the animated TV show Invincible, starting from the end and working backwards. See the overview here.

Last time I was a little nonplussed.

We arrive at the precipice, the penultimate instalment of Invincible viewed backwards. Game of Thrones, among other “prestige” TV shows, gave the penultimate episode a sense of importance: these are the episodes where Ned Stark dies, the narrative climax of our season-long train of events. This is a role that a second episode viewed in reverse order can’t really hope to fill — there are no grand revelations here, no sudden departures. Instead we get as close to a stock episode of the show as is possible, an artefact from a dimension where Invincible is a Saturday-morning cartoon, with every week a new villainous threat.

It’s an episode heaving at the seams with what you might call “world-building”, endless detailing of who knows who from where, why, and when— and if you were invested in the worthiness of the itemised lists of facts about fictional worlds, this would be a fine first episode to watch. I may have given an involuntary groan upon realising I was being shown an establishing shot of an American High School, straight out of Family Guy. The sketch we’re given here for the structure of the show, interestingly enough however, is more in line with Rick and Morty than it would appear — from both subsequent episodes and from promotional materials . Space travel and inter-dimensional visits are firmly within bounds.

What’s interesting are the lengths the creators go to present a best-foot-forwards view of what the show is able to do, despite being bound up in all this housekeeping. This could easily have been another episode #3, a sloppy plate of here’s-what-you-get where the inadequacy of individual elements is (hopefully) excused by the variety of them. In an appropriately backwards manner, the episode ends with a gorgeously rendered high-contrast sweep of action, as Omni-man destroys the art deco dimension. Reminiscent of nothing more than the original plan for the Superman: The Animated Series introduction, it’s a striking end to the episode, even if it does highlight that nothing of such indulgent ambition in the animation turns up again, save perhaps some of the scenes of detailed viscera.

The genius of Rick and Morty is in the recognition that the average viewer of a show like Rick and Morty is immersed in this kind of thing, and so is both likely to be very familiar with the tropes of sci-fi and fantasy — and be willing to explain them and/or read explanation of them at length on the internet. In this way, the show is free to engage in it’s iconic rapid-fire movement through different high-concept settings, pastiches and references. (This means the show is completely antithetical to ‘world-building’, by the by, and the writers are not afraid of nakedly poking fun at the legion of fans determined to fit the show into one unifying rational world.) The time-travelling aliens in this episode would fit easily into any given episode of Rick and Morty — we efficiently find out how they work (they move through time fast relative to us), the implications of that (they’ll be coming back) and then they come back. The basics fixed, we get some details that are going to cause us trouble: they advance very quickly technologically, but not so quickly that they cannot hold a grudge. And finally we get the twist: Omni-man can destroy their civilisation in the relative time it takes him to grow a small beard.

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The trouble is that Rick and Morty isn’t just brutally efficient in the high-concept sci-fi settings; it’s also brutally efficient in the more prosaic stuff. Which is to say that most of this episode felt unnecessary to me, devoted to disseminating facts that are easily apparent from any given episode of the show — we get to find out that Eve goes to the same school as Mark, and she’s in a second-string hero gang led by an intolerable robot with tedious teammates. We get introduced to the space-CIA, exercising global authority under a constantly visible US flag. We’re introduced to Rex, who threads the needle between irritating and pathological a lot better here than he will in subsequent appearances (I can confidently state now that the scene where the “New Guardians” wash the blood off in episode 8 is, in full context of his season arc, still laughable).

As discussed in the previous episode (#3), every subsequent appearance from the detective demon has made him look less threatening and more incompetent. This episode does not break the pattern. He really does only feature for his five minutes of being-Rorschach.

Alien Seth Rogan is a pleasant diversion and nothing more — it was a little unclear to me whether or not he’d ultimately been to Earth before and what had happened? With the benefit of foresight I know he’s only coming back for some denouement at the end of the season anyway.

Because I don’t think I’ve mentioned it under any other episode heading, Sandra Oh (Debbie) really is top tier, along with JK Simmons (Omni-man) and Walton Goggins (Cecil). Between the three of them, the work-life balance scenes are consistently the most engaging scenes in the show.

I’ll take a moment to note the gorgeous design of the family house itself, a well-realised, well utilised set, despite being animated. It’s a house that at first appears open and welcoming, but the more time you spend with it the more it becomes clear that it’s a winding nest of secrets and cubby holes and invisible observers where the only constant is that wherever you are, someone could be watching. This episode may only be setting up the fundamentals, and to me that seems unnecessary, but it’s important to reflect on how much of those fundamentals — setting, casting, design— the show gets right.

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Next time: we finally meet and then unmeet the Guardians of the Globe.

Ranking, best to worst:

1. #5
2. #8
3. #4
4. #7
5. #2
6. #3
7. #6

This is the sixth in a series of episode reviews for the animated TV show Invincible, starting from the end and working backwards. See the overview here.

Last time we talked all about Watchmen.

Mostly another miss, I fear.

As was potentially inevitable with watching the series in the way I am, this episode dragged a little as scaffolding was rapidly constructed for the events of future episodes—with the real problem maybe being how much of it is for events that I wasn’t wildly endeared to when I was seeing them happen.

Signals were mixed from the opening twin eulogies, where Omni-man as a public figure — matched, you’ll note, with military hardware as an element of state force — is contrasted with Omni-man as a private figure at a small funeral of friends. The sequence somehow fails to make very much of this contrast, where the similar sequence in Batman v Superman (surely a direct inspiration, complete with matching stone monument) contrasts the public sacrifice of Superman with the private loss of a son and a partner, Invincible ultimately doesn’t have anything to say about the bit-characters who have died. All it can say is that Omni-man is duplicitous and authoritarian, which may as well be stencilled on his costume.

The bulk of time is given over to the (re)formation of the Justice League analogue, swallowing up Eve’s prior teammates in what is now clearly a set of Teen Titans (the name was obviously always there, but seeing Robot in action as the Red Tornado analogue seals it all together.) They fight, we see the team assembled — including the tensions that they will carry all the way through to episode #8. We get the introduction to Monster Girl’s tragic circumstances, whereby forcing her to be a superhero seems unspeakably cruel. Let someone else do it, Monster Girl. Live out your remaining life in the forwards direction.

Hell’s Rorschach is back again, this time with more of the demonic styling that his look is derived from. I found him less effective here because Kirkman (or whoever conceived this character for the TV show) can’t really pull off the trick Alan Moore did of properly getting inside the head of a radical libertarian and giving a sympathetic, if not positive, account of that worldview. The demon just seems like an imbecile, a suggestion not improved by his retro-future jumpsuit. He turns up in all the right places, but fails to ask any questions that would advance his investigation or successfully lance the morally grey characters he’s supposed to be furiously casting into good or bad. The best he can do is suggest that you’re going to go to double-hell or whatever. Have him rant! Have him accuse everyone who interferes with his investigation of morally compromising themselves or revealing their own perversions. It feels like because the writers don’t have any respect for the worldview, they didn’t feel obliged to give it any wins — where Moore with Rorschach is constantly weighing the scales towards and then against Rorschach, baiting you into finding him more appealing than the flabby liberal Dan Dreiberg, then reminding you that he’s a racist sexist fascist homophobe. A disappointment.

Conversely CIA Cecil is back to his creepy, manipulative best: teleporting into a teenager’s bedroom to berate them for not advancing US military goals. Then with that achieved, he scoots back to the black site just over the road from our protagonist family, from where he can see a heat scan of the room he was just in. Eve later has a brief moment of voyeurism watching Mark and Amber make out through the window — the weedy CIA assistant is presumably watching as well.

The less said about Doctor Seismic the better: completely incoherent, largely unfunny, the show cannot decide at all what it wants to say via this character’s inclusion. Why is there a link between Amber’s interest in social justice and this old man ranting about slave-owning Presidents while trying to sling some Hawaiian shirt-wearing, camera-toting tourists into a lava crevice? There is so little effort in this sequence that the scene ends with him dunking himself unprompted into some lava.

I did enjoy the scenes between Eve and Rex, which was a pleasant surprise. Rex is here as a flash-forward of Mark and Amber’s relationship, constant minor betrayals interspersed with grand romantic gestures. She’s right to turf him out; the only think I’m left wondering is if there’s enough time left in the first two episodes of the show for Eve to do any being ‘long-suffering’ in. So far she has made at least one assertive, successful life choice in pretty much every single episode, contributing to her overall being one of the most compelling side characters.

More than any other so far, this episode underwhelmed me. Aside from the Doctor Seismic sequence it wasn’t actively dysfunctional as with episode #6, but I might be reaching the limit of gaining perspective from viewing the episodes in reverse order. Little is clarified here by having future knowledge and much is made unnecessary. I’m hoping not to have the same experiences with episodes #2 and #1, but we’ll see.

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Next time: things start to end, by which I mean, begin.

Ranking, best to worst:

1. #5
2. #8
3. #4
4. #7
5. #3
6. #6

This is the fifth in a series of episode reviews for the animated TV show Invincible, starting from the end and working backwards. See the overview here.

Last time it was fathers, fathers, fathers in my favourite episode so far.

We have a Rorschach!

I was almost worried that after all my initial bluster about Watchman being the totemic work for this kind of project, that all we’d get is the vague allusions with Cecil observing Omni-man from his room full of monitors — the smartest man on the cinder-in-waiting. Now thankfully we can add to them the Demon, who I think I caught a glimpse of in the “previously on” in episode 5 — he’s Rorschach by way of Hellboy in design, and his character is somewhere triangulated between Rorschach, the Rorschach-inspired Question from Justice League Unlimited, and DC’s Etrogan the Demon. In terms of how he fits into the structure though, he’s pure Rorschach —tenaciously following the breadcrumbs on the unsolved murder of superheroes sponsored by the state.

And what’s fascinating is that both in this story and for this story, Rorschach must be exorcised — there is simply no room for libertarian heroics here. There is the liberal technocratic state, and there’s authoritarian fascism, and even when they’re at war they’ll happily team up and dispatch you to an unimaginable hell just to have you out of their hair. Rorschach had to pursue the Comedian’s killer because no-one else cared about the death of a washed-up old solider; the Guardians of the Globe however are actively managed assets, much like Omni-man himself. Cecil and his organisation will get to the bottom of who killed them simply as a matter of bureaucratic good practise and because everything that happens with the super-humans is managed by his team. Rorschach is superfluous and worse still, won’t play the game. So Cecil very efficient murders him.

Like Rorschach, the Demon leaves a journal behind for someone to continue his work — but when it gets opened in the next episode there’s very little actual insight contained within. At the end of Watchmen Rorschach’s testimony is capable of tearing down one man’s great lie. There’s no scope for the Demon to reveal Omni-man’s role in the killings to “the public” because there’s no reason for the public to care outside of the gossipy blogs we see Debbie skimming. There’s no trick being played on the people, just an internal struggle between two factions of state power — albeit one faction is concentrated in a single man. There’s no need to fool the entire system because the entire system is complicit.

Which brings me to my headline for this episode: the most outdated character in Watchmen in a post-Cold War world is the Comedian, because we now live in a world where it’s impossible to imagine that any super-powered being would be able to avoid becoming an agent of state violence. Many of our most popular fictional heroes volunteer — “we’d like to talk to you about the Avengers Initiative”. The heroes of Watchmen, flawed though they were, met up in a run-down apartment room to discuss teaming up over a pinboard. In Invincible they attend a clean, modern facility with a purpose-built combat chamber, at the leisure of a shadowy government alphabet agency. The Comedian was unique among the Watchmen in that he was the only hero — presented with the reality of what they were doing, policing rioters with violent force — who didn’t care that he was merely an arm of state violence. This was also Frank Millar’s brutal sketch of a Reagan-appeasing Superman in The Dark Knight Returns. Rorschach was a violent fascist but he was under no illusions as to the contempt he was held in by the police. Nite Owl may have been a cowardly fantasist who let his best friend get murdered by a God, but at least he was doing it all under his own power, with the state held at arm’s length. The Guardians of the Globe may as well have been a whole team of Comedians.

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Beyond that, there’s the start of Mark’s relationship with Amber. I’d assumed their relationship would predate the start of the series, but no, it’s here — and in its inception he’s making all the same mistakes, fundamentally not treating Amber like another person but as a series of boxes to tick in any way necessary. Looks like this one was doomed from the off!

Elsewhere in teen relationships, I had somehow missed until now that “Rex”, Eve’s dickhead ex who her father was so enamoured with, is the man with the high red collar and indistinct powers on the Justice League satellite. I almost wish they were separate people, to give more of an openness to this “superhero community” they namedrop in the episode. He could fill in the stereotype of the kind of hero her father would approve of just by existing.

Olga, who we meet here for the first time, has an abominable Russian accent.

I’m in two minds about what the date sequence with Omni-man and Debbie is meant to portray. Is it meant to show us the true root of their relationship, that she taught him what it means to be a hero and he integrated it into his fascism? Or is he like Mark, fundamentally misunderstanding the point of the relationship, especially given his warped perspective of how long and intense it is?

The Mars sequence which dominates the main chunk of the episode is both yet more Dragonball indulgence, meeting the dusty Grand Guru of the Martians, and also another explicit reference to Justice League and DC generally, with the shapeshifting Martian race who just want to be left alone.

The notion of an unstoppable space empire, whose soldiers are so violent and destructive that tolerating a single one to remain on your planet spells global destruction, is some slightly wonky foreshadowing for where the next four episodes are going to go back on Earth — although Omni-man is slightly more well-dressed than the brain monsters. The whole thing resting on the Martian King not talking to Mark for more than five minutes about what exactly he knows about Mark’s race is a little contrived, however.

Robot status: more sinister, more creepy, we got the sneak peak of his true form that’s apparently hiding out in the back of a garbage truck. It’s a little unclear to me whether the subsequent events of the show with regards to Robot are meant to reveal that he had a weird-but-understandable motivation for all this creepy nonsense, or if it’s meant to be new levels of overall creepiness. I’m enjoying the show’s naked love of the big burly cloner guys though. Amoral pseudo-arms trader scientist strongman is an excellent combo, and from the way they’ve appeared so far even in episodes that don’t strictly concern them, I’m assuming they have a big role to play. “Cecil’s an idiot” is one of my favourite lines.

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Next time: we spin the wheels a little bit in episode #3.

Ranking, best to worst:

1. #5
2. #8
3. #4
4. #7
5. #6