Invincible

I love Invincible, it’s one of the best comics I’ve ever read. Read it or watch the series, there’s very few changes anyway. Do it now, read the rest of this post later.

This contains heavy spoilers from the Invincible comics. This is the only time you’re being warned.

What is it with us that makes hating on things much more natural and, in a way, more enjoyable than praising something? It’s social media, isn’t it? I remember when being a nerd meant that you knew a lot about your favorite nerdy thing, and you could talk endlessly about how cool it is. Nowadays, it’s just hate, hate, hate.

The first thing that came to mind when writing this was Cecil’s death, because it sucked. More details below, but while that did suck, this comic is incredible and has revived my love for comics. Many of the story elements that made 0 sense in Marvel or DC superhero comics were executed so well here.

Bad guy won’t stop coming? Throw him into space

Or throw him into the sun, speed through his planet’s core and destroy it, all the things we wondered why superheroes never do. Some superheroes are bad, they murder, steal, lie, but being bad is not so black and white.

Nolan murdered hundreds of people, but he’s an alien whose barely lived a glimpse of his life on Earth. We hold in reverence real individuals who have arguably committed many more murders. Not to defend his actions, but he’s not a monster either, and the comic showed that beautifully.

It does have its quirks though

Cecil’s death

Cecil and Mark were talking. Robot appeared, slashed his throat before Mark could react, then stomped his head. Robot is a genius, he knew Cecil would have eventually been fine with it. Cecil is also quite intelligent. If Robot told him he saw Mark die, but then Mark came back and claimed Robot was a traitor, even explaining how he got defeated, how would he not teleport away the moment Mark started screaming, how did he have 0 defense with him?

You’d think Cecil would have something on his body that would monitor his vitals and take some sort of safety precaution.

Of course, I would have preferred Cecil to not die at all, but if you want to kill him off at least make it make more sense. He’s gotten out of much worse situations before, this was just cheap. Felt a bit like Trevor killing off Johnny in GTA V.

Do I hate all deaths of characters I like in media? No, some of them are great, some of them even made me like the character a lot more, such as Rex’s death. He went out with a bang, he was cool, it made sense and didn’t feel cheap at all. There is however a sense of emptiness when a character you really liked is no longer in the story, especially if they’re the main reason you were interested in the first place.

While it was cheap, it was still somehow executed much better than a lot of what is happening in today’s media so I can’t really hate it, but Kirkman pulled a fast one on us with Cecil. Just look what he said a few issues after

The fans are idiots?

In one of his 4th wall breaking moments

While I get it, it’s annoying to be chastised for not wanting something engaging and new. I read comics for particular characters. If you replace those character with someone else then the reason I was reading those comics is gone. Yeah, the story might still be cool, but there’s millions of cool stories out there. I don’t have time to read them all, so I’ll just read those who have characters I really like.

I want engaging and new stories, but with SomeMan, not with ReplacementOfSomeMan. Replacing can be good too, but the character has to be good. Look at Flash for example, replacement was literally what made it get more and more popular, until it wasn’t because it was done lazily. Barry Allen exploded Flash into what it is today, and Wally got it to even higher places, but after that it’s been a mess of bad writing.

I have no idea what Kirkman meant here or what caused this. He even made the argument through Mark that it’s just as likely to alienate the dedicated readers. I’m not alienated from Invincible, but I sure don’t feel like checking out his other comics.

Maybe I’m misunderstanding the point and he emphasized engaging and new to poke fun at this argument, but in his last 4th wall breaking moment he said releasing 15 covers for a comic is shitty to dedicated fans, who being completionists by nature, are basically forced to buy them all, but then he did exactly that. Thank God for the internet and computers. Now we can stack all those covers in a single file and we don’t need to worry.

You should still read it though

Invincible really is amazing. The two things above do suck, but they’re minor(arguably Cecil’s death is quite major though), and they don’t take away from the rest of the story in general. I don’t know how it changes from here, will finish the rest and make another post with my thoughts.

Regardless of how it changes, it’s still worth the read at the very least up to here, and if you read to this point you might as well finish it.