Back Issues: "Invincible" #25-35Hey folks, it’s been a little while, but I’m back with another back issue examination piece about the creator-owned Image Comic series Invincible, by Robert Kirkman and Ryan Ottley. I’ve already covered the first 24 issues of the series in previous articles (here and here), so today I’ll be discussing issues 25-35, collected in the Invincible Ultimate Collection volume 3!
If you’ll recall, the last time I talked about this series, I didn’t have many nice things to say, especially about the very slow pacing and the introduction of too many sub-plots. That problem goes away when you get to these issues. And remember the big series-long arc of Invincible’s species, the Viltrumites, eventually coming to Earth to claim the planet as Mark’s dad was initially supposed to do? And remember how I said that plot is almost completely absent in the previous batch of issues? Well, now it’s at the forefront.
And that’s kinda sorta what Invincible feels like. There is some stuff that happens in between these big issues, but it also kinda feels like Kirkman has these big “events” planned for each landmark issue, and then he tries to make events work at that pace, instead of letting the events of this story happen naturally. That’s something that’s always bugged me about writers trying to make the landmark issues feel important, and it definitely feels a little bit like a problem here. But we’ll talk more about that when we get to issue 50.
This is where the Viltrumites tell a nearly unconscious Invincible that he is the new designated Viltrumite of Earth. And if he doesn’t prepare it for conquest like his Dad was supposed to, then there will be heck to pay. This is good because the series removes Mark’s dad as the villain he was portrayed as around issue 7, but it doesn’t remove the threat to the planet. In fact, now things seem worse, because it’s not just Mark’s dad, but a whole bunch of people as powerful as him. This is also another point where the series changes forever. The insect people of this world age extremely fast. So Mark’s half-brother gets to come to Earth with Mark, as per the request of Mark’s insect step-mom. So now Mark’s mom, who has just barely been able to cope with her husband being a murderous traitor, now has to raise this kid her husband went and fathered after he left her. But fortunately for the kid, she loves him like he was her own. So after the big space war with the three Viltrumites, very little happens. Mark visits his platonic friend Eve in Africa, then that Angstrom Levy guy with the mutated brain attacks Mark’s mom. Since he has the knowledge of all of his multiversal counterparts, he was easily able to figure out Mark’s secret identity, and target his family. This seemed like it would be a big deal, because outside of the looming threat of the Viltrumite invasion, Invincible doesn’t really have a whole lot of great villains. He has a whole bunch of what I would call “joke” villains. Remember in the Batman Beyond cartoon when an episode would begin with Batman fighting Mad Stan, who hated the government and wanted to bring it all crashing down? But you never saw an entire episode devoted to Stan. He was basically just a joke who was there to show that Batman had more enemies than the ones you saw on a regular basis. Well, Invincible has a whole slew of those kinds of baddies. Characters like the Elephant, Bi-plane, Black Samson’s butler, Mastermind, the Mauler Twins, none of them ever really pose much of a threat. I was fine with Invincible not having many villains of his own in the first year, because there’s a lot of things to set up in that time, but by the time you get to issue 34, you really should have a stable of serious rogues for your hero to fight. But Angstrom Levy was really the first actual bad guy that felt like the series was taking seriously…and he gets killed one issue after he comes after Mark. Now I’m not gonna get in this whole “should the hero kill” argument that blew our society to smithereens after the Man of Steel movie and again after Batman Vs Superman: Dawn of Justice. I actually think, in the circumstances in this issue, Mark had no choice but to kill this guy. But come on, this was his first real bad guy, and now he’s gone! And after this series spent 8 issues setting him up? (Slight spoilers for later issues and future articles, but he does come back. But I’ll get into that more in the future)
Sometimes you see characters do something like this and it’s swept under the rug and never mentioned again (hey, didn’t someone just mention the Man of Steel movie and Batman Vs Superman: Dawn of Justice earlier?) So those are my (somewhat extended) thoughts on this batch of issues. An overall improvement over the previous batch, but still facing some issues that I feel are keeping me from saying that this is a great series. So keep an eye out for another article I’ll be doing about another group of issues sometime in the near future. And in the meantime, keep it trashy, muties! 
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