Invincible creator Robert Kirkman says the show challenges the comic

Robert Kirkman began writing in 1974. Invincible, he didn’t know if his original superhero concept would last five issues. Twenty years later, his fifteen-year career on InvincibleRyan Ottley, Cory Walker, and Ryan Ottley are the two artists behind this great achievement in superhero comics. It has also spawned a highly acclaimed and popular animated adaptation that can be found on Amazon.

“I think that one of the reasons Invincible has done as well as it has is that I’m not a creator that is pointing out the deficiencies of the superhero genre, or pointing out what I don’t like about the superhero genre,” said Kirkman. “InvincibleIt is intended to highlight everything I love in the superhero genre. So it’s accentuating the weirdness and the bizarreness, and digging in and trying to play with all the tropes, and do new takes on them, and put my spin on familiar superhero stories.”

Image Comics’ 1992 founding brought about the creation of a number of superheroes independent of Marvel. But those comics were heavily rooted in the extreme, excessive storytelling and aesthetics that characterised the time. There were many times when InvincibleWhen it debuted eleven years later, the series retained many of the more violent impulses of that period, especially when it was about violence, but also provided more complex character relationships and explored the dysfunctional Grayson family.

Mark Grayson, the teen superhero of Mark Grayson, was on an amazing journey to discover new worlds that led readers. This journey required him to confront his truth and learn about Omni-Man. He is a Superman-analog who pretends to be a hero, but in reality, Omni-Man is a galactic conqueror mass-murdering Earth ready for alien invasion. These stories got more brutal but Kirkman was just as hurt as the readers when they saw these characters being pushed beyond their limits.

“There’s a lot of stuff that was very emotional for me as a writer,” said Kirkman. “There’s definitely some difficulty around there, but the writers of everything that anyone enjoys are always feeling the emotions that they’re trying to get out of their readers, or viewers, or whatever, while they’re writing the stories. Anytime something is sad or devastating, there’s certainly a level of that that you feel as a writer, and if you’re able to channel that into the story, I think that’s what makes the story good.”

That devastation was impeccably depicted on the page by Kirkman’s artistic collaborators, and Kirkman recognizes that Invincible wouldn’t be what it is without them. “Invincible is everything I loved about superheroes written down and seen through the filter of Cory Walker and Ryan Ottley,” said Kirkman. “And the filter of Cory Walker and Ryan Ottley is brilliant. Cory Walker is one of my favorite character designers. His visual ideas are truly unique, I believe. They’re clean, they’re exciting, they’re amazing. And that’s one of the reasons that he’s the perfect guy to be handling that aspect of it on the show.”

Image: Amazon Studios

Walker drew the first seven issues and then handed over art duties to Ryan Ottley. Ottley would continue the series’ artwork while Walker returned for a guest appearance. “Ryan Ottley is one of the best fight scene artists in comics,” said Kirkman. “He gets action. Action is his favorite thing. The way that we were crafting the stories, and trying to show these epic conflicts between characters that can push buildings over and break school buses over their knee.”

“To be able to actually illustrate that is another thing entirely. Ryan was willing to do whatever it took, and Ryan did that. Over the fifteen and sixteen years of working together, Ryan committed so much sweat, blood, and tears to making this book a reality. I would come up with insane scenarios with crazy detail, and he’d be like, ‘Yeah, OK, gonna do this now,’ and to have it come out as regularly as it did is crazy.”

Writing was difficult because it required you to maintain a sense of continuous escalation. Invincible Kirkman said that he was not able to lose momentum when he moved from event to event. “Managing expectations — as the series progressed, that became something that I think I got pretty good at by the end,” said Kirkman. “Using each piece of every storyline to prime the reader into preparing for if it was going to be an upturn or a downturn. And making sure that every new villain and every big fight in some way tops the one previously.”

“It was definitely something that we were pushing ourselves into a corner we were never going to get out of if we had kept the series going much longer. You can’t have two people swinging suns into each other. Although, now that I say that…”

Image: Ryan Ottley/Image Comics

Kirkman originally envisioned an ending for the comic as a creative experiment. He drove the story to a fictional conclusion without committing to the final chapter. That changed around issue 100, when an ending started to feel like a necessary part of the book’s concept.

“Invincible was always about playing against type, taking all the tropes from the decades and decades of Marvel and DC books and subverting them in an interesting way,” said Kirkman. “And so for the entirety of the series, we ultimately subvert what superhero comics are. They never stop. They change and evolve. The creative teams also change. But they keep on going. Invincible be a book that has a beginning, middle, and an end got very exciting for me and Cory and Ryan.”

There are two InvincibleAnd The Walking DeadKirkman is known for his gruesome stories. This helps him to get an emotional response from his readers. “I look at [violence] like it’s one of the tools in the toolbox. It’s all about turning dials. It’s all about trying to figure out what’s going to get the reaction you want for a given scene, what’s going to make the audience feel the way that you want them to feel. It’s certainly a tool that I go to often in almost everything that I do. You could almost say it’s a crutch. I’m willing to admit that, but I think it’s probably the best tool to get somebody to recognize the gravity of the situation. Visually illustrating the importance of the situation.

“It’s something that I think is absolutely essential, especially in the world of Invincible,” said Kirkman. “For Invincible, it’s a representation of realism. It’s an animated series. This is a world of superheroes. How do you make the stakes seem real for an audience? You show them graphically disturbing images to illustrate the dire circumstances. You can see how fragile the citizens of these fictional worlds, in which superheroes crash through buildings and destroy landscapes. You feel nothing when superhero stories fall on entire cities. This is the goal Invinciblewas to bring down one building. It made you sad for all the other people who lived there. You’re feeling bad about Mark having to face his father.”

Kirkman admires Amazon’s willingness to allow them to add the same degree of violence as the animated series. Invincible The show is perhaps the most faithful adaptation of a comic superhero: Comic creators are involved in its creation. Kirkman was a writer and executive producer on season 1, and he’s the co-showrunner for season 2. Walker, who was the main character designer in season 1, is now a producer and oversees an entire staff of designers. Ottley provides feedback at every stage of the process.

Because the show is animated, it is able to channel the specific look of the comic in a way that wouldn’t be possible in live action. Kirkman sees the series as an extension of his comic. He views the opportunity to create a second draft based on the feedback from comic readers. The show was in many ways a test for readers.

“I have a memory of how every issue was reacted to,” said Kirkman. “I read the fan mail. “I did a letter column and I replied to people. It’s great to be in a writers room and be able to say, ‘Well, they didn’t really like that character because I did this; let’s see if we can make them like that character. They hated this character; let’s see if we can make them hate them more because that’s what we want.’”

The series’ stacked voice cast has also influenced the storytelling, with the actors revealing new aspects of the characters to explore. “We’ve known these characters for so long, but now we’re seeing these interpretations from these amazingly skilled actors that are taking things in their own direction.” Kirkman shouts out Jason Mantzoukas’ Rex Splode as a performance that helped him understand the character better, along with Walton Goggins’ Cecil Stedman and Seth Rogen’s Allen the Alien, who joined Mark in last week’s teaser announcing Invincible season 2’s “late 2023” release.

It is the success of Invincible It all depends on the family unit, and the series stars three top-notch actors in these roles. Kirkman is impressed by the way Steven Yeun uses comics to guide his performances. This allows him to modulate and build organically to the extremes that he’ll eventually need to. Sandra Oh’s performance as Mark’s mother, Debbie, has significantly deepened the character’s role in the story and brought Kirkman to tears at multiple times in the recording studio. And in the especially challenging role of the show’s homicidal father figure, J.K. Simmons captures the diametrically opposed fury and humanity that make Omni-Man a tragic figure.

Kirkman’s work as a TV producer for a series about superheroes requires him to stay up-to-date with the most recent superhero media. He still goes to see every new superhero movie,And is excited about James Gunn’s upcoming plans for DC along with the third installments in the MCU’s Ant-Man and Guardians of the Galaxy franchises. He selfishly wants DC and Marvel to stay out of the R-rated lane so that they don’t encroach on Invincible’s bloody turf, and laments that Batman has been pushed into a darker live-action territory rather than appearing in more kid-friendly fare. While he does see potential for the superhero train to slow down, he’s confident it will always be running.

“My buddy Rob Liefeld says, ‘You think we’re going back to a barefoot guy running through a building with guns after we’ve seen people fly and shoot lasers out of their eyes?’ There’s no going back from this,” said Kirkman. “There’s a level of spectacle that movies and television have evolved to require, and that level of spectacle is second nature in superhero stories. I think there’s always going to be a place for it.”