Robert Kirkman adapts his own comic into a bloody animated series about a boy whose father is the strongest hero on Earth. The talking scenes look cheap and the fights do not, and Sandra Oh and J.K. Simmons make the family worth caring about.
Mark Grayson (Steven Yeun) has spent seventeen years waiting to become his father. Nolan Grayson (J.K. Simmons) is Omni-Man, the strongest hero on Earth, who arrived from another planet and settled in the suburbs with Debbie (Sandra Oh), who is human and does not seem to mind. Robert Kirkman adapts his own comic, and the first season of Invincible is good and lopsided. The talking scenes look cheap. The fights do not. And a family drama holds the whole thing together, one we cared about more than the punching. If superheroes are your thing at all, it is worth the eight hours.
The look is the first joke. Wilson Tang’s production design gives the city clean lines, flat shading and the primary colours of a Saturday-morning cartoon, and the heroes wear the kind of costumes a child would draw. Then somebody is hit, and the series shows exactly what a body does when a man who can lift a tanker puts his fist through it. Teeth, cartilage, the lot; the certificate is 18 and it is earned. The title card comes up in yellow, and with each episode a little more blood is splashed across it.
We will not say what happens in the last minutes of the first episode. We will say that we sat through it with a hand over our mouth, that we had assumed we knew what sort of programme this was, and that it took us a while after the credits to press on. Matthew Sipple’s editing does not look away when we badly wanted it to. Everything afterwards is played with the audience knowing something most of the characters do not, and the writers, Kirkman among them, get a great deal of tension out of watching people fail to ask the right question.
Simmons is the anchor. He plays Nolan with the flat certainty of a man who has never lost an argument or a fight, and the certainty is the frightening part. Sandra Oh is the reason it is more than a fight programme: Debbie married a god and still does the washing up, and Oh gives her a tiredness and a dry humour that make the house feel lived in. Yeun’s Mark is eager, cracked-voiced and wrong about most things, which is the right way to play seventeen. Seth Rogen turns up as Allen, an alien who tests planets by hitting their champions, and has the funniest scenes. Mahershala Ali’s Titan, a stone-skinned heavy who wants out of a criminal’s employ, is the best of the side stories, because Ali will not play him as a villain.
The flaws are plain. When nobody is fighting, the animation is stiff: mouths move, eyes blink, and bodies stand at three-quarter angle holding a pose for the length of a speech. Thirteen directors are credited on the series and you can see the seams between the episodes that spent their money and those that saved it. The high-school scenes are written with less conviction than anything involving a punch, and there are middle episodes that feel like homework. The complaint that there are too many characters is fair; the series keeps adding heroes and expects us to keep them straight.
Most critics compared it to The Boys, and the comparison is useful mostly for the difference it shows. The Boys is about contempt for the powerful; Invincible is about being related to them. It is the warmer programme. John Paesano’s score is straight heroic brass and strings, played without a wink, and that is the right call: the series is not sneering at the cape, it is asking what it costs to live in a house with one.
It has since run to four seasons of eight episodes, and the pattern set in the first holds: long stretches of people in rooms, then a fight that leaves a crater and a body count. The drawing steadies as it goes. Sterling K. Brown joins in the second season as Angstrom Levy, and gives it a grievance worth hearing out.
Watch the first episode on its own, before you decide, and not over dinner. If the last five minutes do not send you straight to the second, nothing later will.
