Amazon just released the first trailer for its upcoming animated adaptation of the superhero comic book Invincible:
From The Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman, and based on the Skybound/Image comic of the same name by Kirkman, Cory Walker, and Ryan Ottley, Invincible is an adult animated superhero show that revolves around seventeen-year-old Mark Grayson (Steven Yeun), who's just like every other guy his age — except that his father is the most powerful superhero on the planet, Omni-Man (J.K. Simmons). But as Mark develops powers of his own, he discovers that his father's legacy may not be as heroic as it seems.
Kirkman began writing Invincible around the same time he launched The Walking Dead comic, and both series kick off with a fairly familiar genre setup before bursting into a bigger and much more interesting world. Instead of a zombie apocalypse, Invincible focuses on a teenage superhero who's basically a hybrid of Superman and Spider-Man. And like The Walking Dead, the story gets increasingly dark and complex as it goes.
I'm definitely a fan of the superhero genre, and whenever anyone asks for any kind of superhero comic book recommendations, I almost always point them towards Invincible. Kirkman and Ottley take everything that's great — and ridiculous — about superhero comics and distill down to a single, coherent comic book that spans about 150 issues. When I say "everything," I mean all the gimmicks, too. There's the Shadowy Government Organization Who Tries To Build A Superhero Army. There are Epic Dimension-Hopping Crossovers (that last for literally just one issue, instead of 58). There are occasional "soft reboots" and costume changes. There's the obligatory New Character Taking Over The Name and Costume Of The Superhero storyline. There are delightful convoluted resurrections and retcons and clonings and time travel and all the other wacky superhero tropes that make people scratch their heads — except, again, they're contained to a single book, with a cast of painfully relatable characters. Also like The Walking Dead, the characters in Invincible grow and change over time. It starts with relatable high school melodrama, and by the end, it deals with issues like parenting, sexual assault, and PTSD, in surprisingly down-to-Earth ways. (Or down to Talescria and the new Viltrumite Empire, as the case may be.)
In short, I can't recommend the comics enough, and I'm very much looking forward to the show's release sometime in 2021. The Invincible animated series will also feature voice acting by Sandra Oh, Seth Rogen, Gillian Jacobs, Mark Hamill, Mae Whitman, and a bunch of other recognizable people.
