Tag: Comics

This is the second 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 found out all about the noble Saiyan race.

Finally revealed! The secret origin of Omni-man’s crazy eyes.

I was delighted in the first part of this episode to find the Dragonball comparison given yet further weight by the addition of androids to the mix. This was most pleasing, as diversionary as it felt — viewing with full knowledge of the tiny robot child’s contribution to the climactic events next episode (none).

The conclusion I’m erring towards is that there’s very little deconstruction of the superhero taking place here: there’s a fairly basic superhero teen narrative that seems awfully close to something you might have seen on Justice League or Teen Titans, and then there’s a second story that’s somewhere between John Wick and Jason Bourne about an unstoppable murderous tool of the state being controlled and managed. Perpetual CIA sad-sack Cecil comments at one point that an ineffectual orbital cannon cost several billion dollars; you’ve got to wonder how much was correspondingly spent on the Omni-man project.

The fighting in the episode, was merrily animated. I did appreciate Robocop-by-way-of-Evangelion’s-seagulls — and of course the mass-production Evangelions were also the secret product of a shadowy governmental clique holding them in reserve as a trump card. I was somewhat disappointed in how Omni-man was not the devastating force of nature he was made out to be in my first episode. His failure to kill Cecil, a frail man armed only with a teleporter whose previous advantage was remaining strictly remote, was particularly unimpressive. Come on! The man is untethered from all morality and has the physical strength to tear the Immortal in two, don’t have him take hits for a few minutes first.

The teen drama is slightly more charming here than it was in the finale, and the sequence describing Eve’s morning routine looks delightful. I’m still not sure what to make of her statement “Looks like I’m helping you today”, which was so weighty that it featured in the “last time” sequence in the previous episode I watched.

The bulk of the episode is taken up with the alternately charming and irritating story of the boy android who did very little in episode 8. It’s a little contrived, but I think I can disentangle it: the episode begins with the (re?)introduction of a disfigured man in a life support tank, who tasks two burly clone-men with installing him in a new body they have grown for him. After some grousing they do this, at which point he immediately betrays them and attempts to imprison and/or murder them. Simultaneously, the disfigured man has been masquerading as a malfunctioning robot in the Justice League watchtower subplot, where he has formed a pseudo-romantic relationship with a woman who ages backwards. Their only reprieve is when he’s ordered by CIA Cecil to return to the base, an order which he obeys immediately. All very puzzling, and only reaffirming the space base as the locus of nauseating teen drama.

The best sequences in the episode take place in the family home and locale, a palpable sense of desperation as Omni-man shreds his connection to humanity piece by piece. The only moment missed is a reflection on his inhumanity in the flames of the exploded surveillance-house across the road — both Batman v Superman and Russell T. Davies’ The Second Coming do this scene with more gravitas.

This is the episode it had to be for the subsequent episode to be impactful; a measure of the existing state of affairs breaking apart piece by piece. It’s not as striking as the finale, but perhaps it can’t be.

---

Next time: Something a little under-cooked in Episode #6.

Ranking, best to worst:

1. #8
2. #7

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

I found this episode to be a very strong opener. A pleasant surprise, and the first half of the episode was very good indeed. Over the full length of the episode some more dubious elements started to creep in, but it was very enjoyable, well animated, and extremely funny. The comic timing on the gag with the ejecting fighter pilot was sublime, giving you just long enough to groan at some laughably non-lethal supervillainry straight out of GI Joe before the fascist moustache man touches down have his full due.

The opening, forced by my malicious watching to be fully in media res, is an efficient and not too self-conscious importing of several arcs of Dragonball. The dad is a Saiyan, the son is a Saiyan, together they come from a planet of fascists who oversee a distant-but-terrifying space empire. The dad is appealing with some fairly thin fascist rhetoric to encourage his slightly weedy son, who he has accidentally raised as a committed liberal, to view everyone he has ever known and loved as somewhere between ants and dogs. Why the empire he belongs to is so enthused about welcoming a planet somewhere between ants and dogs into the peacefully into the fold remains unexplored. It’s not a great pitch, but fascists are often pretty stupid so I’m willing to let it slide — for now.

It’d be nice to see in a future season some character from the Saiyan homeworld (the word is “Viltrumite” but I won’t be typing that more than once) who can give it the full Mishima and present a properly unpleasant vision of the argument for a fascist superman in this way.

But yes, the dad’s arguments are so-so — it’d be easy and consistent for him to make an argument for a hierarchy of beings which included some modicum of respect for his wife, who he obviously has affection for in spite of his statements about longevity and perspective. Dismissing her feels like a sop to making the choice easier for his son, who in one of the best visual/audio gags in the episode he remembers as a gap-toothed youth hitting a home run in softball — by virtue of the noise/image combination of knocking several of his teeth out.

There are themes dancing in the shadows here, the notion of an individual so powerful that the most intelligent man on Earth, standing silhouetted before an array of surveillance screens, poses no more threat to him than the most intelligent ant — an individual tethered by relationships to a life he otherwise wishes to reject entirely. But for his other flaws, Dr Manhattan was not a fascist. Still, extremely promising potential for a work that overall grapples at least somewhat seriously with the legacy of Watchmen in a way that, say, Doomsday Clock did not.

The scene of the dad causing various catastrophes to happen to ‘teach’ his son the fragility of human life is a hammy delight, bringing to mind all the things you might do in an open-world video game where you consciously decouple yourself from the pretence that it’s anything other than a simulation; crashing trains and knocking down buildings. It adds a delusional edge to the dad’s atrocities, where it’s less that he is only pretending to care about human life (and as ever, we know that the power of love will come back to contradict that) and more that he believes both at once: he loves his wife and son and enjoys life on Earth, but he can choose to “remember” that none of it is real.

The only note that doesn’t quite hit is the dramatic sequence where the son attempts to rescue someone from a collapsing building and ends up holding a grizzly severed arm; it’s completely bathetic where it should be traumatic.

---

Beyond the father/son strife, the episode was more of a mixed bag. The spooky CIA operative is cloying, his sad-dog attitude as he manipulates and orders people to their certain death one of the more uncomfortably realistic things in the episode. That said, having him stand with several other characters and watch the action unfold on a big screen is such a naked shortcut gluing the first half of the episode to the second, cheating so that everyone already knows what they need to know.

The fact that there’s a second big screen with a second motley crew watching events unfold live takes it to absurdity. This all-too-human set of superheroes is a real weak point, at least in this episode, a bunch of sappy teen drama throwbacks who can surely only exist to get murdered for stakes in future episodes as-yet unproduced. Their presence awkwardly casts them as “real” people, in contrast to the faceless hordes wiped out by the collateral damage of the fight in the start of the episode, which almost endorses the delusional aspect of the dad’s evil-making — the structure of the episode treats some people as worthy of mention and other people as not. The line “we can at least Save People” is the worst in the episode, straight out of a theatrical show of Age of Ultron or some garbage.

I enjoyed the scene towards the end with the mother and the techno-tailor in his Iron Man CAD room, where there’s definitely a story thread potentially brewing about the humans who might welcome an alien fascism so long as it grants them relative boons. How long did the mother spend courting, dating, then happily married to a fascist? When he returns, will she forgive him?

One issue with watching the last episode is first is that there’s nowhere to subsequently go to find out what happens next, and I’m hardly going to degrade myself by reading the comic.

---

Next time: We discover a secret origin in Episode #7.

Ranking, best to worst:

1. #8

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:

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