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Super-Powered and Sophisticated Comic-book titan Robert Kirkman and his team create a brightly colored world of superheroes for Amazon’s animated Invincible series. By Ramin Zahed
I
f you like your animated superheroes to be complicated characters who wear brightly colored spandex costumes, you are going to love the new adaptation of Robert Kirkman’s popular Invincible series, which arrives on Amazon this month. The show, which was created by Kirkman (The Walking Dead) and artists Cory Walker and Ryan Ottley, is based on the hit comic book published by Kirkman’s own Image imprint between 2003 and 2018. This great-looking series follows the adventures of Mark Grayson (voiced by Steven Yeun), a high school student who discovers that he has inherited the superhuman abilities of his powerful extraterrestrial father, Omni-Man (voiced by J.K. Simmons). Kirkman says his new show celebrates the magic of the superhero genre and doesn’t stray away from any of the cool elements that fans of the comic book have fallen for over the years. “It has crazy storylines and offers aspects of the su-
perhero world that haven’t been represented in animation,” he says during a recent phone interview. “We really get to see superheroes in a new light, and hopefully we’ll be expanding the genre.” Kirkman, who worked closely with Walker, supervising director Jeff Allen and the team at Skybound Entertainment (The Walking Dead), says he was inspired by retelling his dramatic tale in the one-hour animation format. “There was a ton of figuring out how to best approach the story about this young character as he enters this crazy world of superheroes,” he notes.
“It was a thrilling journey to watch our hero Mark mature and come to his own throughout the eight hours of the first season.”
Parallel Projects Development for the show was started about four years ago at the same time that Kirkman began exploring a live-action feature adaptation of the property with Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg. (The movie version is also moving forward.) He says one of the main challenges of the project was getting an animation studio to commit to a 2D hand-drawn
‘Invincible has crazy storylines and offers aspects of the superhero world that haven’t been represented in animation … We really get to see superheroes in a new light, and hopefully we’ll be expanding the genre.’ — Show creator and exec producer Robert Kirkman
www.animationmagazine.net 14
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april 21
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