INVINCIBLE, SEASON ONE (2021)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, sociological*

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

I didn't follow Robert Kirkman's INVINCIBLE series, so prior to beginning to watch the Amazon TV show, I read a handful of the earliest comics. and found them to be nothing more than a routine "decompression" comic book.

As soon as I began the first of Season One's episodes, I soon found that the show, helmed by one Simon Racioppa, was at least innocent of the charge of decompression, which would have meant that plotlines unreeled in the slowest manner possible. From that first episode, it's obvious that the producers meant to take full advantage of the animated format. INVINCIBLE fills all eight episodes of its first season with big, honking fight-scenes, which I'm sure Racioppa and his fellows think is all that superhero fans really want. And we're not talking pristine Jack Kirby punch-ups. Body parts go flying, and copious blood flows.

INVINCIBLE, on the face of things, reproduces the archetypal superhero setup of comics' Silver Age, where the daily routine of contemporary Earth is interspersed with the almost constant battles of superheroes and supervillains, with a few alien invasions thrown into the mix. But I said "on the face" because that's all INVINCIBLE replicates: the surface setup. If I were inventing thematic titles for my reviews, I'd have called this one, "No Time For Wonder." Whether it's the title hero, his faux Justice League allies, or villains with colorful names like Doc Seismic and The Mauler Brothers, all lack any emotional context. They're all just gaudy chess-pieces, and they exist to support a pedestrian, badly-structured melodrama.

The title character is Mark Grayson (Steven Yuen), teenaged son of Deborah and Nolan Grayson (Sandra Oh, J.K. Simmons). Though his mother is a mortal human, his father is also the most powerful superhero on the planet, Omni-Man. He's also an extraterrestrial, so even though the Graysons were able to interbreed, they're not sure Mark will inherit his father's super-powers. Of course, if he didn't, there would be no story. In due time Mark gets his powers, is trained in superhero-ing by his father, and takes on the persona of Invincible.

Almost as soon as Mark's made his debut, tragedy strikes. All of the Earth's foremost protectors, the Guardians of the Globe, are slain by none other than Omni-Man. Cecil Stedman, director of the Earth-agency that liases with the Guardians, suspects Omni-Man's guilt, but keeps his own counsel due to the killer's almost insuperable powers. With the Guardians gone, a group of adolescent heroes, the Teen Team, must step up and become the new Guardians. Patently, this came about partly so that Invincible would have a bunch of adventure-seeking peers, not least Atom Eve, who in her secret ID goes to the same school as Mark.

All of the characterizations of the main character and his regular cast are, as I said above, "pedestrian." The only one I liked a little bit was Teen Team leader "Robot." Though his fellow crusaders think he's just an intelligent automaton, the body of "Robot" is actually a surrogate for a genius with a deformed body, and a minor arc is devoted to how he tries to make himself a new body, and the romantic course he charts for himself.

The "badly structured" complaint applies to the whole Omni-Man arc. The scripts never give any reason as to why the false hero chooses to eradicate his former allies at that particular time, though his proximate motive is that he's actually an agent of the alien Viltrum Empire. He kills the superheroes with the general idea of softening up Earth for conquest, though there's no indication that Omni-Man's people are anywhere close to invading. Of course eventually both Debbie and Mark find out his true nature, and this leads not only to loads of emotional angst, but also a bloody battle between father and son. Invincible loses the contest, but his father can't quite exterminate the seed of his loins, so he departs Earth, though he comes back for a new arc in the second and last season.

INVINCIBLE is like a huge, intricate ice-sculpture. It looks good on the surface, but there's no heart beneath all that ice.