Invincible’s creators wanted season 3 to avoid the easy answers of Marvel’s or DC’s ‘very clear’ morality
Estimated reading time: 9 minutes
In theory (if not always in practice), the superhero genre is founded on clear-cut morality. Sure, there’s plenty of scope for costumed adventurers to grapple with power and responsibility, and their lawbreaking adversaries sometimes have a point. But in the average DC or Marvel joint — hell, arguably even in edgier fare like The Boys — distinguishing between right and wrong isn’t exactly tough. That’s a big reason why we turn up: because we know who to root for. It’s simple, it’s reassuring — and it’s the opposite of what Invincible showrunners Robert Kirkman and Simon Racioppa were shooting for with the Prime Video show’s third season.
Whether we’re talking about protagonist Mark Grayson’s feud with his Machiavellian ex-boss Cecil Stedman, the redemptive arc of murderous Superman pastiche (and all-time bad dad) Omni-Man, or even the return of multiverse-hopping maniac Angstrom Levy, Invincible season 3’s message is the same: Don’t expect any easy answers.
[Ed. note: This article contains spoilers for Invincible season 3, episode 8.]
For his part, Kirkman credits his own DC and Marvel fandom with inspiring Invincible’s murkier approach to the capes-and-tights set’s ethics. The scribe took what moral ambiguity there is in mainstream superhero fare and used it as the basis for a 144-issue Image Comics series (co-created with artists Cory Walker and Ryan Ottley) that would eventually become a multi-season animated show.
“[Invincible’s] just an effort to try and show a really dense, nuanced universe that looks at these fantastical elements and superhero storytelling with kind of a realistic slant,” Kirkman says over video chat. “Having read Marvel and DC Comics since childhood and watched all the movies and TV shows, there’s a very clear line of, These guys are good and these guys are bad, and every now and then you’re watching those movies and you’re like, I think Michael B. Jordan is right in Black Panther. We’re really just trying to explore that deeper. What are the motivations of all these individual characters?”
We see this again and again in Invincible season 3, which constantly blurs the line between hero and villain. Titan is a ruthless crime boss; he’s also a loving husband and father who meaningfully gives back to his community. Mark’s little brother Oliver straight-up murders the Mauler Twins, but to be honest, his rationale — those two were never gonna stop threatening innocent lives otherwise — holds up. And let’s not forget Tether Tyrant and Magmaniac, the supervillain couple whose failed attempt to go legit opens season 3, episode 3 in heartbreaking, Up-esque fashion.
“They’re just human beings that got dealt a bad hand in life,” Kirkman says of Tether Tyrant and Magmaniac. “They got powers that they couldn’t necessarily save cats out of trees with. There’s a tremendous amount of sympathy for those characters. In life, not every person that’s doing bad things is a bad person.”
“And vice versa,” Racioppa chimes in. “Not everyone who’s doing good stuff is always a good person, right? I’m sure you have a hero, someone you love, and then you read their Wikipedia article and like, Oh, actually they did a couple things that aren’t so good either. That’s a real person. We try to ground our characters in the real world, which means they’re not one thing or another. They’re complicated characters that contain multitudes, right?”
That extends to Cecil, who finally gets a backstory in Invincible season 3, revealing a disarmingly progressive streak in the otherwise hardline Global Defense Agency director. He’s prepared to rehabilitate the likes of Darkwing and D.A. Sinclair — something Mark, who’s firmly in the classic “lock them up” crime-fighter camp, can’t countenance. It’s more than a tad hypocritical, given Mark is himself the beneficiary of a post-homicide second chance (even if his supposed victim, Angstrom Levy, eventually turns up alive).
Even Cecil’s more ethically dubious moments this season — implanting a sonic device in someone’s head without their knowledge is a dick move — are easily reframed as necessary evils. From where Cecil’s standing, it’s his job to prepare for every possible threat (including Mark going rogue); otherwise, he’s letting the entire planet down. If that means recruiting disgraced vigilantes or betraying his superpowered subordinates’ trust, so be it. As Cecil tells right-hand man Donald in episode 2, “We can be the good guys, or we can be the guys that save the world. We can’t be both.” Some viewers will no doubt agree, and that’s exactly what Kirkman and Racioppa hope has happened.
“If we didn’t show Cecil’s perspective and make it a reasonable perspective — and I say reasonable, one that you’re like, I understand why he would do this or why he would think this way — then what are we doing?” Racioppa says.
“We tried to treat these characters as real people in a grounded scenario. I think Cecil’s position makes a ton of sense, but I also think Mark’s position as a 20-year-old person is like, What are you doing? This is wrong. This is unethical. We can’t do this. […] The answer is somewhere in between, and actually, in some way, there is no answer. The answer is whatever you think of that scenario. They’re both right. They’re both wrong. It’s up to each individual audience member to decide where they fall on that spectrum.”
Said spectrum also applies to Omni-Man, whose ongoing tilt at redemption is arguably Invincible season 3’s most contentious character arc. If this were a DC or Marvel joint, Mark’s old man would renounce his old ways, perform a few good deeds, and reclaim his spot in the do-gooder clubhouse — despite killing millions of people at the end of Invincible season 1. After all, it worked for the MCU’s Loki.
That won’t fly in Kirkman and Racioppa’s universe, though. Omni-Man’s victims aren’t faceless collateral; they’re clearly defined people, like new season 3 foil Powerplex and his dead sister and niece. Unsurprisingly, it’s a lot harder to get behind Omni-Man’s atonement tour when you’re up close and personal with the lives he’s destroyed.
“I love that we get the opportunity on the show to zoom in,” Kirkman says of Powerplex’s introduction in Invincible season 3. “There’s a lot of superhero [stories] where cities collapse and they talk about thousands of people dying and things like that, but to be able to focus on individuals really brings up that question of the redemption of Omni-Man. Is it even possible when we’ve drilled down to the individual [level] and shown the effects of what he’s done? At that level, you identify with those characters [he’s killed or left traumatized] and it makes it harder to see the good in Omni-Man and understand what it is that he did. But that’s the challenge before us and we’ll see where it goes.”
Racioppa agrees, citing the price of forgiveness as central to Omni-Man’s journey in Invincible season 3 and beyond. As it stands, Earth’s onetime premier superhero still has (to borrow an expression from the MCU) a lot of red in his ledger. But he’s started chipping away at it, at least. The culmination of Omni-Man’s season 3 reset comes when he leaps to the aid of lovable bruiser Allen the Alien in episode 4 — demonstrating his renewed virtuousness in the most Invincible way imaginable: by squishing someone’s head.
As acts of contrition go, they don’t come much grislier. That feeds into Kirkman and Racioppa’s overarching stance on Invincible’s signature ultra-violence, which reaches a whole new level in the show’s third season. Season 3 wraps up with Angstrom Levy wreaking havoc across the globe with an army of evil Marks, followed by a skyscraper-toppling slugfest between Mark and Viltrumite heavy Conquest. It’s not unlike the endless cycle of destruction that characterizes DC’s and Marvel’s respective shared universes (albeit decidedly gorier); however, Kirkman and Racioppa are adamant Invincible’s fight scenes are about more than creatively staged carnage. They’re an extension of the themes and emotional arcs — including moral choices at least as tough as any of Mark’s foes — that drive the show itself.
“I see a lot of violence for violence’s sake,” Kirkman says. “And what we try to do on this show is that any time something horrific is happening or something that’s extremely over the top, there’s a level of emotion to it that I think justifies it. Or at least, that’s the goal. And that’s something that everybody on this show, from Simon to myself to the supervising directors, the character designers, the board artists — everybody is trying to hold this stuff together with a strong emotional core, so it feels like everything that we’re doing is earned.”
“Hopefully it feels like we shouldn’t be able to remove a fight or an action scene from this show because you’d be missing an emotional beat,” Racioppa observes. “You’d be missing some of the emotions of the story there. We try to infuse everything with that. So, rather than just being like, Oh, let’s have just Mark have a cool fight in the sky. That’s not enough. It has to be, Why is he fighting? What is he feeling when he’s fighting? What are the repercussions of this fight going forward? All that kind of stuff is — it’s all in common. We think about that from day one all the way through to the final mix of the show.” Mark’s trajectory in Invincible season 3 reflects this. By the time the credits roll on episode 8, our hero has officially abandoned the no-kill code (mostly) followed by Superman, Batman, and their ilk, as a direct response to his latest clash with Levy. No doubt the poor guy would’ve preferred a less agonizing teachable moment — but with Kirkman and Racioppa at the helm, that was never in the cards.
Invincible season 3 is now streaming on Prime Video.
