Funny thing about the teenage super-hero genre... it's been done any number of times, but it still retains an appeal for me, largely because so many talented creators have managed to put new spins on it. Invincible is another example of that, a book about a teenage super-hero that holds to the conventional but still feels fresh, thanks to some great character work by Kirkman, a fairly subtle twist on the concept and a light sense of humor that keeps it fun without setting it all up as a target for ridicule. The artwork by Cory Walker and Bill Crabtree also hits all the traditional buttons, colorful and bright with some great action and good "school" sensibilities as well.
The first thing that strikes me in thinking about Invincible is that it is fairly traditional. Secret identities, teen super-teams and strange visitors from another planet who become super-heroes make up a big part of the structure. However, Invincible, like many books these days, focuses less on the super-hero side of things and more on how the person in the costume views all of these things. Thus we get great scenes of Mark first discovering his powers and telling his parents about them, or becoming friends with one of his teammates at school or even fighting off aliens with his dad.
That last one, by the way, is a good example of where Invincible breaks with tradition. Though there have certainly been legacies of heroism before, few have really written about an active super-hero and his super child, at least not without falling back on some of the cliches like the father not wanting the son to expose himself to danger or the son keeping his identity secret from his parents. To Mark and his parents, super-powers are something they were expecting, and while Kirkman gets some humor value out of this strange idea (especially when it comes to the deadpan reactions of Mark's mother Debbie), this family unity and super-heroing as a parent-sanctioned idea instead of teenaged rebellion is where a lot of the book's strength and originality lies. This is only one part of the formula which I think gives the book its relatively angst-free feel. This is super-heroes that remember that being a super-hero can be fun, something all too many creators either have forgotten or just don't believe anymore.
Kirkman's first work at Image Comics was on the Savage Dragon spin-off Superpatriot, and it's easy to see the Larsen influence on his writing as well as on Cory Walker's art. Like Larsen, there's a certain updated Silver Age style to the work, and while bombs killing innocent kids may be a little darker than your average Silver Age books, the demented mad scientist behind the whole thing and his motivation is right out of the Silver Age. Ditto for the costume designs on the characters, which reach the "iconic" level that Kirkman pokes gentle fun at in the first chapter, or for the bug-eyed aliens who menace father and son in chapter three. Kirkman has plenty of fun playing with the conventions of the Silver Age, whether it's powers like superspeed and flight or the notion of where to change into costume, and he does it without hitting all the old jokes about phone booths and the like that we've all heard before.
Though Invincible is a solo book in some regard, and Mark is most definitely the main character, this is really an ensemble cast book. Omni-Man, Mark's father, gets development both as a hero and a man, and I love the twist on the utopian alien society origin that Kirkman gives the character in chapter two, as well as the sort of "Father Knows Best" qualities he gives the character without making him humorous or unhip. In addition, though I really like Mark, I must admit that the character who really captured my heart was the funny and down-to-earth Atom Eve, and while it's cool that Kirkman avoids the obvious route in making her Mark's girlfriend, it's also a shame because he's given the two of them great chemistry.
As well as being a book full of good stories, the first Invincible trade is also exactly the kind of thing I like to see in trade packaging. Rather than just providing four monthly issues with a spine, Image has gone the extra mile and provided some good extras in this package, from Kurt Busiek's humorous introduction to the exhaustive and very informative sketchbook section that fills out the back of the book. The only downside there is that most of the covers that are in the sketchbook section are actually stronger than the ones that graced the book, and it seems like maybe the creators ought to enlist Busiek as cover consultant given that the cover for this trade is the strongest one the book has seen by far.
