Invincible reminds me quite a bit of Ultimate Spider-Man, and that's both a compliment and a complaint. It's a compliment because Kirkman and Walker have captured that same feeling of teenage angst without being too overwrought and the same idea that super-powers can be as much fun as they are a burden and responsibility. It's a complaint because while the craft is solid and the market is hardly flooded with teenage super-hero books right now, I prefer for new books to seem a little more new and fresh rather than a solid but unspectacular take on a familiar concept.
Where Invincible is at its strongest is in the depiction of the lead character, Mark, and his family and school life. Kirkman really captures the unusual routine that is Mark's life, which is partly routine happy family/school life and partly the oddity of having the world's most renowned super-hero as your father. Probably the most interesting scenes in the book are the ones where Mark first discovers he has powers or where his father discovers that he's using them. Skipping right over the time-honored and well-worn "do I tell my parents?" and "am I a freak?" type of scenes, Kirkman instead has Mark expecting his powers, and his father expecting him to become a hero.
In fact, in terms of structure, this book is pretty impressive. Kirkman and Walker impart a lot of information about the status quo of Mark and his family and relate the origin story all in one issue, without it feeling rushed or too stretched out. In that respect, at least, this is superior to Ultimate Spider-Man in the economy of storytelling. While still giving us a good feel for the personalities of the lead character and his supporting cast, Kirkman gets all the basic origin stuff out of the way in the first issue. I also greatly appreciate that Mark's family is happy and normal, rather than beset by needless angst or fights, as it mirrors the experiences I'm used to seeing more than the soap operatic existences most heroes lead.
Walker's artwork is what I would describe as strong but unspectacular. The storytelling is terrific, with a nice mixture of perspectives and multi-panel pages, but the splash pages and the general iconography is not really flashy. There are no big explosive splash pages, as even the splash that opens the first page feels more functional than breath-taking, and while there's a certain attention paid to details in the background like logos on the dumpsters, toiletries in the bathroom, or the props on the desks or in the bank, it also seems like Walker mostly has an artistic outlook focusing on what is absolutely necessary to make the story clear, rather than adding unnecessary but neat bits of flourish.
Invincible is the second release in Image's super-hero line, and like Firebreather, I found it to be a fun read, but I still haven't seen compelling reasons why Image decided to take the plunge of creating a new super-hero universe. The books are decent enough, but so far they also seem similar enough in approach to the books by Marvel or DC, and the super-hero market remains as crowded as ever.
