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.

Double Entendre: Invincible #88 Review

In the latest issue of Invincible, our all-American boy hero is attacked by a raging one-eyed monster and gets a load sprayed in his face causing him to be infected with a deadly virus. I am not kidding. Superhero comics, everybody!

Invincible is a strange book for me to review because unlike any miniseries or most standard superhero comics, there is no jumping-on point. It’s an excellent comic book that does really interesting and unexpected things with standard superhero tropes – and has since the very first issue – but while this book has arcs, it is very much a long-form superhero novel, and it assumes that you’ve been reading from the first chapter. So even if I recommend this issue – and I will – it’s pointless, because if you haven’t read it from the beginning, it’ll be three years and about twelve trade paperbacks before you get here.

And, in fact, this book is an even worse place than usual for new readers to get started because it’s a mid arc story. The one-eyed monster in question is named Allen, and he is threatening to release a virus into Earth’s atmosphere to kill a race of superpowered aliens living secretly among us, all of whom can be identified by their universal big, Johnny Wadd Holmes 70s gay porno moustaches. I recognize that this sounds ridiculous, but it’s better than it sounds… frankly, it pretty much has to be.