INVINCIBLE #26

By: Al Brown
Review Date: Thursday, September 29, 2005

The first year of Invincible completely blew me away. It started off as a pretty light-hearted book: high-schooler Mark Grayson gets superpowers, just like his dad Omni-Man, and the two of them kinda romp around defeating bad guys together. It was a fun read and a pretty fluffy one. But around issues 10 - 12, Kirkman pulled the rug out from under us: it turned out that Mark's dad was an evil alien sent to conquer the Earth, and he'd just been training his son to prepare him to help with the enslavement of the human race. Mark had a problem with that, so his dad beat the crap out of him - nearly killed him - and then took off into space. The brutality in issue 12's fight was all the more shocking because I'd spent the last year thinking Invincible was a feel-good book.

Not many authors would have the balls to pull a story like that out. Not many would trust their readers enough to change pace that radically. It was seriously brilliant.

The problem was, once Omni-Man took off into deep space the book kinda started treading water a little bit. The relationship between Mark and his dad had been the core of the book, and without Omni-Man around I kinda felt like...well, like we were just waiting for him to get back. It's not that the book sucked during this time: Mark started stepping out from under his father's shadow as a superhero, went to college, and told his girlfriend he was a superhero to get himself laid. (Which is the single most realistic thing anyone's ever done in a comic book. I try that all the time, but it doesn't work because I don't have a cool costume.) So yeah, stuff happened, but it wasn't quite as compelling as that first year had been, and Kirkman's other drop-dead brilliant book, Walking Dead, slowly took over as The Kirkman Book You Absolutely Must Be Reading.

And then - well, and then I'm going to spoil the ending of last month's issue, so if you're way behind on Invincible or just reading the trades or something, feel free to skip directly down to the Comments area so you can post something about what an a-hole I am. Still with me? Are you sure? Okay, here we go. And then Mark agreed to go help some aliens out and when he got to their freaky home planet he found Omni-Man sitting on the throne. So after about a year of Mark learning how to handle himself on his own, Kirkman has taken us sorta full circle, back to that core father-son relationship.

And that's where the action starts in Invincible #26, and Kirkman immediately goes in a completely unexpected direction. I could have imagined a number of ways Mark's reunion with his dad could have gone...but this never entered my head. Hell, it almost felt like a letdown to me, until I remembered that You Must Trust Kirkman. This is what I love about him: you just have no idea what he's gonna do next. He might kill off a main character. He might reveal that someone's been a bad guy all along. He might dress an alien up like a talking dog and have everyone fight about it. But one of the great things about him is, he doesn't just let plot threads dangle. He'll let stuff simmer for a while - and by "a while" I mean "a friggin year" - but he will pull it together for you eventually, which is a lesson JJ Abrams could stand to learn.

So anyway, this issue is laying the framework for what will probably be the next year or so of Invincible: sloppy tongue-kissing with alien praying mantises. I mean, Mark's reunion with his father. I suspect we're thrown a bunch of red herrings here: exactly what the hell Omni-Man is up to is (probably) still a mystery. And the last page of this issue is almost as surprising as the last page of last issue. If that makes any sense. Which it really doesn't. Also revealed (sortof) is what the hell Robot's been skulking around for, and I totally pegged it: as I have suspected for some time, it involves a talking mutant fetus. I can't believe you didn't guess that. It was totally obvious, dude.

I haven't even talked about Ryan Ottley's art, because it's the same as it's always been so I feel like there isn't much to say about it - but hell, maybe this is the first time you've ever read a review of Invincible. So okay: Ottley's art is awesome. It's simple and clean - very comic-booky and very easy on the eyes. Ottley handles subtlety and _expression as well as he handles full-stop bloody eyeball-popping action. Kirkman's writing has been great, of course, but this book wouldn't work without Ottley's ability to switch gears from "cheerful teen superhero" to "ultraviolence" on a dime. Great stuff.

I'm gonna suspect that you, the dude reading this, probably doesn't buy any Kirkman books. If you did, you wouldn't need to read this, right? Because you got Invincible #26 in your pull list yesterday and you've already read it. Although it's possible that you're reading this just to see if you agree with my opinion of it, and you're about to post a comment telling me how wrong I am about everything, in which case I have three words for you, buster: talking mutant fetus. Where was I? Oh yeah. So to you, the non-Kirkman-buying comic book reader: if you're going to buy one book by Robert Kirkman, it should be Walking Dead. But if you buy that then you will be instantly addicted, and then you'll want to buy two Kirkman books because he's so awesome...and if you're going to buy a second book by Robert Kirkman, it should be Invincible. Because it, too, is awesome.

Thank me later.