'Invincible' Comics Revisits Superhero Tropes, Now Animated Series on Prime Video -

Amazon Prime Video / Image Comics

  • The

    Invincible

    animated and superhero series

    begins Friday on Amazon Prime Video, with the first three out of 8 episodes of Season 1.

  • It is an adaptation of the eponymous comic book by Robert Kirkman, the father of

    The Walking Dead.

  • Between homage and subversion, the series develops a rich and violent universe.

With the closing of the cinemas, the superheroes no longer have a place on the big screen and fall back on the small one, like

Zack Snyder's Justice League

 and its IMAX format or

Wonder Woman 1984

 repeatedly rejected. and finally available on April 7 on VOD.

Poor people ?

But no, superheroes and superheroes have long flourished on television, and even more than ever, with the phenomenon

WandaVision

, followed by

Falcon and the Winter Soldier

on Disney +, the good surprise

Superman & Lois

or the iconoclasts

The Boys

on Prime Video.

Amazon's SVOD platform also draws a new superheroic series on Friday: 

Invincible

, according to the eponymous comic book by Robert Kirkman and Cory Walker published by Image Comics in the United States and Delcourt in France.

Its first characteristic, and it jumps to the eyes, is that it is about a series… animated!

There too, the superheroes did not wait today to come alive, with many Marvel and DC series, and even for the latter, a whole universe of animated films, adaptations of the most emblematic arcs of the comics.

But why this specific choice for

Invincible 

?

Any resemblance to Superman is no accident

On their pitch alone, the comics and the series do not necessarily stand out from the all-comer super-heroic.

Mark Grayson is a normal high school student, living a normal life, in a normal American suburb.

Ah yes, his father, Nolan, is none other than the superhero Omni-Man, extraterrestrial of the race of Vitrumites and leader of the Guardians of the Globe.

When developing superpowers on his own, Mark must soon embrace his superhero destiny, Invincible.

Any resemblance to already existing stories and characters is quite voluntary on Robert Kirkman's part.

Indeed, the screenwriter approaches the figure of the superhero as he approached that of the zombie in

The Walking Dead,

returning to the sources of the myth and keeping only the essential.

Without the artifices of live adaptation

Powers, costumes, identities… The spectator and spectator will surely have an impression of déjà vu in front of the first episode of

Invincible

, he will see it at worst a copy / paste, at best a tribute, and therefore he will not see the end coming. (attention small spoiler), the massacre of the Guardians of the Globe and a narrative and moral twist.

This perhaps explains the choice of animation: greater visual freedom, and let's say it violence, as well as a faithful, almost literal transposition of the comic book, without bothering with the artifices of adaptation. live.

Because while pretending to follow a clear line, to stay within the framework,

Invincible

nonetheless tests things, subverts the genre, and even develops, in 15 years and 25 volumes of publication, a rich, nuanced universe, and now animated.

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  • Animation

  • Series

  • Amazon Prime Video

  • Super hero