“Invincible” is not like other animated superhero series.
On the one hand, the episodes are over 40 minutes long, a departure from the shorter run times of most superhero cartoons. It is also extremely violent and explicitly bloody. An opening scene from the first episode includes a horrible eye injury that, however, looks almost innocent compared to the bloody, bone-pulverizing battle that takes place in the final moments of the premiere.
The chaos, brutality and macabre battles are true to the roots of the comics of the “anything goes” program, which opens on Friday on Amazon Prime Video. “Invincible” is based on the comic of the same name, which was created by “Walking Dead” creator Robert Kirkman and artist Cory Walker and was published by Image Comics from 2003-2018.
“Invincible is not intimidated by the ugly side of super-powerful beings that fight face to face with each other,” said Kirkman, who also created the series. “The fact that we show, in a somewhat realistic way, how terrible these consequences are and how wild these beings can be, is very important.”
Some characters, however, have been reinvented. Idealistic teenager Mark Grayson, who becomes the title hero and learns the burden and responsibility of empowerment, is now a descendant of Koreans to match the show’s star, Steven Yeun, the “Walking Dead” veteran who just be nominated for best actor Oscar for “Minari”. The main cast is complemented by Sandra Oh, who plays the voice of Mark’s mother, Debbie, and JK Simmons as his father, Omni-Man.
“Especially in my early days, as a stupid white person, you find that your default state is: ‘This character starts out as white,'” said Kirkman. “So it was good to be more aware of that and have the opportunity to bring diversity to the series that, frankly, should have been there from the beginning.”
“Invincible” starts with three episodes on Friday and will continue with five episodes a week to complete its inaugural season. And there is still more “Invincible” ahead: Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg are developing a live action movie for Universal Pictures. Kirkman’s Skybound Entertainment is one of the producers.
In a telephone interview earlier this month, Kirkman, who wrote the first and last episodes of Season 1 of “Invincible”, spoke about the voice cast, the number of special effects and a possible return to the Invincible comics. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
Was adapting the Invincible comic for TV easier or harder than adapting The Walking Dead?
In a way, it’s a little bit easier than “The Walking Dead” just because the comic book was finished, so we had a much more definitive roadmap for where to go and how to get there. It was great to sit down and say, “OK, well, you know, if this is a success, this is a seven-season structure, this is a five-season structure.”
Have you ever thought about handing the show over to someone else?
I definitely wanted to be involved. I worked closely with Simon Racioppa, our main writer, to map which parts of the book would be covered this season and how we would reorganize things. Writing the pilot and the end of the season was very important for me because there was some material in these episodes that I really wanted to address. Besides, I love animation. I would not miss the opportunity to be very practical in bringing Invincible into the world of animation.
Was there a concern to bring the level of violence from comics to the screen?
My main concern was possibly that we would be limited in what we were able to do. The coagulated blood that exists in the Invincible comics is nothing but extreme, but at the same time, I think it is absolutely essential to make Invincible what he is.
Comic book creators often say that they have an unlimited budget for special effects. How different is it in animation or in live action?
Whenever someone says in the comics that you work on an unlimited budget, you are annoying an artist. This is technically true, but it falls on the artist’s shoulders. This incredible alien invasion that you are spending 12 pages writing and that takes a little time, the artist has to do a monumental job to achieve it.
I would say that the animation is the same. You are not renting games, but it is actually a labor cost. We were going to be able to do all those crazy things on this show that we wouldn’t be able to do on a live action TV show, but that would be an extreme strain in our animation studio Maven Image Platform. We had to negotiate a lot with them about how it would be handled.
Can you talk about the changes in the race or ethnicity of some of the characters?
Well, the Invincible comic was made by white guys in the early 2000s. Once in a while, you think, “Oh, yes, we need to put a little more diversity into this,” but at the end of the day, you really don’t have one book that necessarily represents the population of the country or the world.
Mark and Debbie’s actual run in the comics was somewhat ambiguous. But I knew I wanted to cast Steven Yeun, and that made it very easy to say that these characters are descendants of Koreans. And we are very careful with our voice cast to ensure that all of the characters’ ethnicities match the actor who was cast.
Invincible’s mother seems to have a bigger role in the series than in the comics.
I think the main reason for this, aside from the cast of Sandra Oh, is that Debbie becomes a much bigger character as the series progresses. In the comics, at the beginning, I don’t think we had a real sense of what we wanted. So it’s definitely a by-product of going back and saying, “We’re going to take a character in these different directions; let’s go ahead and start building this now and make this a more complete character from the beginning. ”And then you have Sandra, and she’ll improve that a thousand times with your performance. This makes him an even richer and more robust character to play with.
You have a very distinct voice cast, including Jon Hamm.
I spent a lot of time with Jon Hamm in various AMC roles. It’s nice to be able to beg a guy to play a role every now and then.
Didn’t Covid affect animated productions as deeply as live action, but did it create challenges for “Invincible”?
It definitely took us some time because we had a team in Los Angeles, a team in Vancouver and a team in South Korea, and everyone was working together in offices. Everyone had to stop and make sure they had the technology available to stop working in the office to work from home. So you have, I don’t know, a thousand different people trying to rebuild the configuration of your home office and start the rhythm. But after that transition process, it seemed quite uniform.
Is it weird to have the animated series happening with the live action movie in development?
No, it’s just more market research. We have the comic book that did certain things, and now we have the animated series that did certain things. The film version is going to be a slightly different experience – these differences keep things from overlapping.
Does working on the show make you want to go back to the comics?
I am definitely tempted. I think a lot about where the story ended and the different possibilities for doing little things. For now, I’m comfortable with the finished comics and the animation running, but who knows what the future holds?