Brand New Day: Invincible #100 Review

Editor’s Note: We can’t afford to be innocent. Stand up and face the spoilers.

Over ten years, Invincible has evolved from a book about a teenaged hero learning both his powers and how to balance being a superhero and a high school student, into an experiment in comic superhero universe building. Seriously: this book has gone from a relatively small-scale story about a dude whose dad was basically Superman, fighting small-scale villains like mad bombers blowing up high school kids, to a seriously ambitious epic about interstellar travel, interplanetary war, politics and intrigues across multiple race, numerous superteams, and a pinkish, one-eyed powerhouse named Allen. Okay, some parts were more ambitious than others, but that’s not the point.

The point is that Invincible, over the years, became something that in almost no way resembled what it started out as: a simple superhero book that was pretty reminiscent of early Spider-Man. And as with The Amazing Spider-Man, Invincible has built up a huge amount of continuity that could make the book inscrutable to new readers. Which means that, as with The Amazing Spider-Man, it seems that writer Robert Kirkman has decided that, with Invincible #100, it’s time for a good, old-fashioned reboot.

Invincible #100 opens up where the last issue left off: with Earth’s oceans rising fast enough to drown coastal cities, and with Dinosaurus crushing Invincible’s head like a beer can and chopping him up into little pieces live on network television. And that’s our show; thanks for coming out, and don’t forget to tip your… oh, there’s more? Yeah, it turns out that Dinosaurus cloned Invinicible, ripped apart the clone for the rubes, to leave Invincible alive to help him with his plan to drown the world to reduce population and save the planet. Invincible reminds Dinosaurus that, as plans go, that certainly is one, so, you know, Dinosaurus feels shame. So much shame that he demands that Invincible kill him, and being a superhero, Invincible, you know, complies. And then Invincible’s old government handler, Cecil, advises him that other superheroes have saved the world, and that rather than sending him to prison for helping Dinosaurus in the first place, he can instead work for the government. You know, just like the old days!

While I can’t address anything that Kirkman might have planned for Invincible in the future, but this issue appears to be, for all intents and purposes, a reboot of sorts. By the time it’s all said and done, we have Invincible back on the side of the angels, working for his old government contact, and back at home with his girlfriend Eve and his family. And while anything could happen in future issues – ten years of story development from a kid learning how to fly to battling Viltrumites with his half-alien kid brother in space demonstrate that pretty effectively – it feels like a return to a smaller scale, more intimate book. And frankly, that’s a pretty welcome development to me. Because for me, Invincible has become a book with just about too much continuity. We’ve seen Invincible beaten within an inch of his life at least four times that I can remember off the top of my head, on at least two different planets and one spaceship. We’ve had various races in various wars across various planets, punctuated by savage beatings on the hero, to the point where despite reading the book every month, I’ve had a hard time keeping track of what the hell was going on sometimes. And maybe that reflects badly on me as a reader, but at this point, I’m ready to settle back into some regular, earthbound superhero action again.

As for the action itself, well… it seems a little rushed here, to be honest. Sure, the Death of Everyone storyline has been kicking around for a bunch of issues at this point, so it’s not like this resolution of this era of Invincible was just jammed in, but let’s face it: we go from Invincible being killed in a full color splash page on page one to Invincible using the old I Robot mental paradox trick to take down Dinosaurus (“No, maybe you’re the bad guy!”) on page 17 to being generally forgiven for playing a part in the attempted genocide of most of the entire fucking human race by page 23 (with that genocide itself moving from “Oh God, we’re all gonna die!” to “Oh yeah, that,” in the same number of pages. So while I liked how the whole thing turned out, it really felt to me like Kirkman said, “I have how many pages to wrap this up in a bow by the 100th issue Fuuuuccccckkkkk….”

Ryan Ottley’s art is much as it has been through the entire run on Invincible. His styly is very much on the cartoony side of realistic, in that his figures are generally realistic in general shape, but done with generally simple lines, with expressive, yet simple and exaggerated faces. This works in the book’s favor in a lot of ways, as it allows Kirkman to write a bunch of truly horrible and violent scenes – like having what appears to be the hero’s head crushed in splash page close-up, including blood and flying eyeballs – while Ottley’s art takes enough of the edge off to make these things terrible, yet not so horrible it makes you want to drop the book. His action is generally well choreographed and fun to watch… although most of the action involving the book’s lead is either psychological or takes place off camera. Ottley’s storytelling is easy to follow, and his page layouts are simple for anyone to decode without any trouble. And there was a nifty little symmetry I found in the book, with page one being Invincible’s head literally exploding in a one-page panel, and the final page being his head figuratively exploding at the news he is given, that I thought was pretty cool. And frankly, after ten-ish years, I pretty much can’t imagine anyone other than Ottley drawing the book. If Invincible is inspired by Spider-Man, than Ottley is Steve Ditko, or maybe John Romita; his stuff just fits.

I firmly believe that Invincible started out very much as a book that was inspired by Spider-Man, and if that really is the case, than Invincible #100 is the issue that corresponds to Peter Parker going to college, or maybe with Brand New Day. It seems like a fine demarcation between a book that had turned into largely galactic and apocalyptic action and one that looks to be smaller in scope, with a major event that should signal a change to smaller-scale, more intimate action. And I could be way off; we could be three issue away from Invincible pushing the Earth out of orbit to sit next to a planet full of, well, pinkish one-eyed wonders, but I left Invincible #100 feeling like we were moving back to smaller scale, more family and Earth based stories. And considering that’s the Invincible I fell in love with, I’m excited to see what comes next.