‘Invincible’ Comics Revisits Superhero Tropes, Now Animated Series on Prime Video – Amazon Prime Video / Image Comics
- The superhero and animation series Invincible starts Friday on Amazon Prime Video, with the first three of 8 episodes of Season 1.
- It is an adaptation of the eponymous comic book by Robert Kirkman, the father of The Walking Dead.
- Between homage and subversion, the series develops a rich and violent universe.
With the closing of the cinemas, the superheroes no longer have a place on the big screen and fall back on the small one, like Zack Snyder’s Justice League and its IMAX format or Wonder Woman 1984 repeatedly postponed and finally available on April 7 on VOD. Poor people ? But no, superheroes and superheroes have long flourished on television, and even more than ever, with the phenomenon. WandaVision, followed by Falcon and the Winter Soldier on Disney +, the good surprise Superman & Lois or the iconoclasts The Boys on Prime Video.
Amazon’s SVOD platform also draws a new super-heroic series on Friday: Invincible, based on the eponymous comic book by Robert Kirkman and Cory Walker published by Image Comics in the United States and
Delcourt in France. Its first characteristic, and it jumps to the eyes, is that it is about a series… animated! There too, the superheroes did not wait today to come alive, with many Marvel and DC series, and even for the latter, a whole universe of animated films, adaptations of the most emblematic arcs of the comics. But why this specific choice for Invincible ? We explain all of this (almost) spoiler-free.
Any resemblance to Superman is no accident
On their pitch alone, the comics and the series do not necessarily stand out from the all-comer super-heroic. Mark Grayson is a normal high school student, living a normal life, in a normal American suburb. Ah yes, his father, Nolan, is none other than the superhero Omni-Man, extraterrestrial of the race of Vitrumites and leader of the Guardians of the Globe. When developing superpowers on his own, Mark must soon embrace his superhero destiny, Invincible.
Any resemblance to already existing stories and characters is quite voluntary on Robert Kirkman’s part. Indeed, the screenwriter approaches the figure of the superhero as he approached that of the zombie in The Walking Dead, by going back to the sources of the myth and keeping only the essential.
Without the artifices of live adaptation
Powers, costumes, identities… The spectator and spectator will surely have an impression of déjà vu in front of the first episode ofInvincible, he will see it at worst a copy / paste, at best a tribute, and therefore he will not see coming the end, the massacre of the Guardians of the Globe and a narrative and moral twist. This perhaps explains the choice of animation: greater visual freedom, and let’s say it violence, as well as a faithful, almost literal transposition of comics, without bothering with the artifices of adaptation. live.
Because pretending to follow a clear line, to stay in the frame, Invincible nonetheless tests things, subverts the genre, and even develops, in 15 years and 25 volumes of publication, a rich, nuanced, and now animated universe.