- [Michael] Thanks to Bespoke Post for sponsoring this
video.
New subscribers get 20% off their first box.
Go to
www.BSPk.me/wisecrack
and enter code wisecrack at checkout.
(upbeat music plays)
What's up guys?
Michael here with another Book versus Film.
Well, in this case, it's
long running-serialized comic
versus adult animation,
but you get the drift.
Anyway, today we're making your dreams come true.
That's right, we're finally looking at Invincible.
- Woohoo!
- [Michael] As you'd expect when a series that ran for 144
issues over 15 years got adapted for the small screen,
they had to make some changes here and there.
But the most interesting one has everything to do with
attitude.
- Tell you what, when you grow up here, Robot, you can tell
me how to swing mine.
- [Michael] We'll explain in this Book versus Film on
Invincible.
(bell dinging)
And spoilers ahead for the first season of Invincible
and a few thousand relevant panels from the comics.
But before we get into it, I wanted to give a shout-out to
this video sponsor Bespoke Post.
Now, if there's one thing I like besides edgy, superhero
animation, it's gear.
Whether it's for cooking, hiking, camping or just hanging
out, I love researching and buying new gear that goes with
those activities.
So I was psyched to learn about Bespoke Post,
a monthly subscription service that sends you a new box
of curated goods from under-the-radar brands.
Every month, they introduce members to products ranging from
outdoor gear,
to bar ware to kitchen goods,
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all based on the results of a preference quiz you fill out.
There is no cost to join
and you can skip a month any time.
And if for some reason you're not feeling the box you get,
you can always swap it out for another one.
Let's check out some of the current boxes.
Oh, so right here, we have their Field box.
Now this includes a slingshot that actually shoots seed
balls, so you can shoot flower plants around the yard.
Ooh, this is a very nice garden balm
which can help make your hands smell really nice
and feel good after working outside.
Finally. Ooh, we got a really nice saw knife right here.
So I'm kind of the food guy for my friends
so I would actually be excited to use that knife to
prepare food by the campfire if we're all outside.
Let's check out what's in the other box.
Okay. So right here we have
the Terra box.
It has a really cool,
this is like a garden tool knife that can sort of saw,
it can slice, you can dig with this.
And at the end of a long day, you could open a cold beverage
with the little attachment right there.
We have
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outside
and then you have a bird caller so you can make friends with
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this summer a lot more fun and a lot more functional.
So to get 20% off your first box, go to
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or click the link in the description and enter code
wisecrack at checkout.
And now back to the show.
Now let's start with similarities
and there are lots.
Overall the show is pretty faithful to the comic.
Invincible is still the protagonist.
He still pals around with the Teen Team.
And Omni-Man is still an Omni-dick.
The narrative centering around the murder of the
Guardians of the Globe is straight out of the comics too.
Where the show does differ is when it changes up the order,
running certain storylines parallel instead of one by one
in a linear fashion.
And that brings us to the first big difference,
the narrative rearrangement of stand-out events from
throughout the comics.
By moving various plot threads to earlier in the narrative,
the show manages to deeply explore a central theme that's
more hinted at for much of the comic,
moral ambiguity.
See, while it's the core of Invincible's first season,
Omni-Man's murder of the Guardians doesn't happen in the
comics until much later,
which is kind of crazy
considering that the Omni-Man reveal is arguably the
greatest heel turn since Hulk Hogan joined the NWO.
- You can call this
The New World Order of Wrestling,
brother.
- [Michael] This allows the show to quickly establish the
status quo,
i.e. Omni-Man is like Superman but with the mustache and
then even more quickly subvert it,
i.e. mustache Superman is a psycho murderer,
all in the course of the first episode.
And while here, Omni-Man's turn to the dark side isn't as
shocking as it is in the comics,
it's more effective at quickly establishing the moral
ambiguity of its central character.
That's because here Omni-Man's literally defined by these
murders.
It's in the subtext of every scene he's in for the whole
season.
The show asks us to consider the juxtaposition
between nice husband and good dad and
super murderer anytime he's on the screen.
It asks us to speculate more on his motivations and ask
important moral questions.
Did he have true agency in his actions?
Could the murder somehow be justified?
Could I make that mustache work?
(boos)
In contrast, in the comics, we spend a long time getting to
know him primarily as a family man, who just happens to be a
superhero.
Not mass-murdery guy with ill intentions.
He's more like a seemingly normal albeit super-powered dude.
And so when he turns,
it feels like more of a major plot twist
and character reveal rather than a thematic commentary.
And this theme of moral ambiguity, arguably explains all
of the narrative reshuffling the show engages in.
All of the major subplots in the show, remember,
are actually drawn from disparate points in the comics
timeline.
And they generally all feature either one,
people we perceive as good doing bad things,
like when nice guy, Robot, collabs with the very bad Mauler
twins to get himself a cool new bod,
or two,
people we perceive as bad doing good things,
like when evil-seeming Titan shows a deep love
and care for his family.
And these aren't the only examples;
there's Alan, the alien who seems like a villain, but turns
out to be super chill.
- Are you using your timeout?
- [Michael] or Nick Fury stand-in Cecil joining up with the
villainous D.A. Sinclair.
Each of these plot elements in their own ways
highlight the central theme of moral ambiguity.
However, having them all happen concurrently,
lets them reflect each other,
offering different perspectives on the central theme.
- I just want to know why
every one of the Guardians risked their necks for you.
- [Michael] Ultimately this strategy builds a rich,
thematic cohesion.
This changes our context for the climactic Omni-Man,
Invincible fight
in which the moral ambiguity we've been feeling is reflected
in Invincible's emotional conflict.
He's torn between his love for his father
and doing what he feels is right.
Now, this scene appears in both the comics and the show
but in the comic it forms the first initial statement
on the theme of moral ambiguity, which will go
on to be explored throughout the run.
On the show, however, it becomes a cohesive statement
in and of itself.
The final encapsulation of a season-long theme.
Let's face it,
a super fight with your dad kind of makes you feel stuff.
I bet I could kick my dad's ass.
So by building up to that over a longer time and using the
thematic cohesion from reshuffled plot threads,
the show mines the emotional and thematic potential of the
event more fully.
- And what if they resist?
- That's why we're here; to keep them from resisting.
- [Michael] But lest you think we're getting soft,
let's get into the nasty bloody, violent stuff with
difference number two.
The show depicts the physical effects of violence in much
more detail than the comics.
Yeah, we are absolutely not exaggerating, so much
animated blood much of which is not super YouTube-friendly,
so please bear with our careful censoring.
This say Invincible is a gory show would be
like saying Elon Musk has a little bit too much money.
The comic is gory too, so it's not like this is a massive
aesthetic shift
but there's definitely a difference.
Namely, the show is willing to go a lot farther
in its depiction of inside body parts on the outside.
Now it's dripping with blood and guts straight from the
jump.
Obviously the fight between Omni-Man and the Guardians of
the Globe at the end of the first episode is, to use an
academic term, gnarly.
And the show doesn't let up.
It's chock-full of moments where we see the full
ramifications of super heroic punch-ups, like the Flaxan
invasions where bystanders get caught in the chaos and spout
thick red life juice everywhere.
This all leads to the truly horrific fight between Omni-Man
and Invincible, which spares absolutely no detail
and showing us exactly what would happen if two truly super
men squared off.
Also, it made me horrified to ride the train ever again.
In contrast, the comic doesn't show any gore until Omni-Man
murders the Guardians much later.
And then it waits a long time before showing it again
in the fight between Omni-Man and Invincible.
So, whereas the comic depicts all the guts and stuff in very
specific scenes,
the show engages in what I'm pointing right now as
squishy consistency, yuck.
But things get really interesting when we directly
compare how certain scenes played out in the comic book with
their animated counterpart.
For example, when the Guardians get offed,
we see Red Rush's eyes popping out of his skull.
Aquarius's dolphin-boy innards spilling out,
and War Woman puking blood down her cape.
The camera takes its time and lingers
on the visceral results of violence, which again,
not kosher for YouTube.
In contrast in the comic, most of the Guardians are killed
in single panels like these.
The violence is abstracted by using block coloring,
rendering it less visceral.
So what effect does this have?
It's probably a matter of opinion,
but we'd argue that when you depict blood and gore
as liberally and regularly as the show does,
you run the risk of desensitization.
Because it reliably appears in every fight scene,
it can't have the same impact that it would if used less
frequently.
Almost like how the F bombs come so frequently
in a Tarantino movie that you need to gloss over them
instead of counting them so you know how many Hail Mary's
you need to do at Confession.
To see this at play,
let's compare the climactic Omni-Man Invincible showdown
with its source material.
And even more specifically,
that subway scene;
easily the most brutal thing in the entire show.
And the thing that might've permanently turned me into a
bus guy.
It's a pretty memorable moment and hard to watch,
so you might be surprised to hear that it's not in the
comics.
So why take the violence to such an extreme place on the
show?
Our guess?
They felt like they simply had to up the ante after a season
chock-full of blood and guts.
But after a scene as harrowing as the subway scene,
any subsequent violence will probably pale in comparison and
thus become a little meaningless.
- These people are meaningless,
they're cavemen without us.
(crunching)
- So while the show absolutely takes the consequences
of super fights more seriously,
it arguably ends up trivializing them
because if everything is super violent then nothing is super
violent or something like that.
Let's move on.
Then finally, difference number three,
the show treats the general super heroics with way more
weight than the comics.
Just like the show takes the consequences of violence more
seriously,
it also takes the fights themselves more seriously too.
As a result, the show and the comic occupy different places
within the wider superhero genre.
Take the previously-mentioned Flaxan invasion.
The major beats are more or less the same.
The Flaxans unsuccessfully invaded Earth,
are defeated,
and returned to invade again a while later.
But the differences in how we're led to perceive each
version of the invasion are important.
See this show takes the view that a swarm of tooled up,
inter-dimensional invaders is a big deal,
which it is.
If Obama taught us anything,
it's that aliens are real and should be treated with respect
and reverence.
Civilians either flee or get obliterated,
and there's a ton of collateral damage.
The heroes narrowly escape death at various points of both
invasions.
During these moments, the score is all sweeping, grave and
dramatic,
indicating that we should take these moments super
seriously, like Christopher Nolan soundtracks seriously.
(dramatic music)
The comic on the other hand frames things quite differently.
First of all, the Flaxan invasions aren't portrayed as that
big of a deal.
The first is treated as a momentary distraction, while the
second serves as an opening gag, complete with a punchline
about the Flaxan's clever, but useless wristbands.
In both instances,
the comic actively subverts the expected seriousness
of an alien invasion,
to the point where it seems like just part of the routine,
which if Obama and that guy from Blink 182 are right,
will soon be our reality.
And it's this theme, the super heroic as the mundane that
defines the comic's versions of events.
They spend less time on epic super battles and more time
showing Invincible at school or chatting with his mom.
It's only when superhero-ing gets personal like the subplot
with the ReAniMen or the Omni-Man reveal
that the comic chooses to focus on it and take it seriously.
The rest of the time, it revels in the larger-than-life
surreality of it all.
It knows how absurd superhero fiction is, but it doesn't
poke fun.
This places the comic firmly in the realm of parody,
where the intention isn't to ridicule, but rather to use the
genre to comment on something else entirely.
The show, on the other hand, doesn't engage in any of the
parodic behaviors of the comic.
Anytime a super-fight happens, it is a big deal with real
big ramifications.
While we do get some mundane moments of Mark with his mom or
best friend, the show aims to sell them as deeply emotional
scenes.
While there is some juxtaposition between the super heroic
and the mundane, it's more in the traditional mold of
superhero fiction; a variant on the Peter Parker,
Spider-Man dynamic.
All of this means that the show and comic occupy different
places in the broader superhero genre.
And a lot of that has to do with the fact that they were
made 15 years apart.
See when Invincible the comic first came out,
it was the very tail end of the dark age of comics.
This is when everything trended grim and gritty and the
industry was preoccupied with questioning what comics should
even be.
Invincible rebelled against that trend, and served as one
of the standard bearers for a new, less-insecure age of
comics.
In contrast, film and television never had to go through a
dark age of superhero, audio-visual entertainment.
It learned its lessons from the comics.
So Invincible the show didn't need to rebel the same way the
comics did.
But that doesn't make what it's doing any less brave.
It shows to take its characters, their actions and the
consequences seriously.
In the process, it makes the compelling case for superhero
fiction as fulfilling character drama with genuine emotional
stakes.
Not the same winking and nudging of the comics we loved,
but a satisfying viewing experience in its own right.
But what do you guys think?
Would the show have benefited from more parody?
Or was the comics more restrained use of gore better for the
story?
Let us know in the comments.
Smash that Subscribe button like it's Invincible's face and
you're a big old subway train and be sure to ring that bell.
Shout-out to our patrons for all your support,
and as always,
thanks for watching.
Later.
(upbeat music)