{"id":40,"date":"2021-05-18T00:38:52","date_gmt":"2021-05-17T23:38:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/joshtest04.wordpress.com\/2021\/05\/18\/introduction-to-unvincible\/"},"modified":"2025-05-05T20:23:50","modified_gmt":"2025-05-05T19:23:50","slug":"introduction-to-unvincible","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fevered.earth\/index.php\/2021\/05\/18\/introduction-to-unvincible\/","title":{"rendered":"Introduction to Unvincible"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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\u2019ve 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\u2019m out of passion: nothing on the horizon appeals to me. Since lockdown began I haven\u2019t even been able to impulse buy terrible DC comics at my local comic book store.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"\/<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Invincible<\/em> is the new Amazon-funded animated adaptation of a comic by Robert Kirkman, now (and then) most famous for writing The Walking Dead, <\/em>a lengthy comic and subsequent TV show about a cast of characters escaping from zombie onslaughts. As The Walking Dead<\/em> is not about superheroes, I\u2019ve never watched or read it, and can offer no further insight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ve also never read Invincible<\/em>, though I\u2019m loosely aware of it as a mid-2000s example of the kind of hyper-violent adult \u2018deconstructions\u2019 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m also aware that Invincible\u2019s 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\u2019m struggling to think what an animated adaptation of a comic from the mid-2000s could possibly have to say as regards \u2018deconstructing superheroes\u2019 that wasn\u2019t screamed until throats were hoarse in the mid-2000s. Or the mid-1980s. It\u2019s not-so-much \u201cnot fertile ground\u201d as it is a barren wasteland of ossified pop culture remains, a salt plain devoid of all but the most transitive life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"\/<\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\n

So what happened is, I saw a tweet\u200a\u2014\u200ajust a joke floating in the aether, I won\u2019t link it\u200a\u2014\u200awhere 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I thought \u201cI\u2019m going to do that.\u201d I\u2019m 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 \u201cgo in blind\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So I took a weekend and watched each episode in turn, backwards, and wrote up my thoughts. And here we are.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"\/
A notable scene from the first episode.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Episode List:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \n
  1. #8<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n\n
  2. #7<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n\n
  3. #6<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n\n
  4. #5<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n\n
  5. #4<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n\n
  6. #3<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n\n
  7. #2<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n\n
  8. #1<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    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\u2019ve 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":2,"footnotes":""},"categories":[94,96],"tags":[11,12,13,14,15],"class_list":["post-40","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-article","category-media-criticism","tag-backwards","tag-comics","tag-comics-criticism","tag-invincible","tag-watchmen"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fevered.earth\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fevered.earth\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fevered.earth\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fevered.earth\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fevered.earth\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/fevered.earth\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":135,"href":"https:\/\/fevered.earth\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40\/revisions\/135"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fevered.earth\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fevered.earth\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fevered.earth\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}