[COLUMN] Invincible's Very Literal Superhero Deconstruction | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece contains spoilers for the third season of Invincible.

When people think of superhero deconstruction, they tend to think about Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen. That is the most famous example of a writer and artist picking apart the conventions and logic of the superhero narrative. Indeed, even Marvel Studios have arguably engaged with Watchmen, to the point that Eternals is best understood as the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s riff on Watchmen.

Watchmen is not Moore’s only interrogation of the superhero archetype. V for Vendetta, the comic that Moore created with artist David Lloyd, is perhaps just as famous, although it tends to be framed as a pseudo-revolutionary text. However, the popularity of Watchmen and V for Vendetta tends to overshadow Moore’s work with artists Chuck Beckum, Rick Veitch, and John Totleben on the comic Miracleman. The importance of Miracleman to the superhero canon tends to be under-discussed.

However, the spirit of Miracleman is alive and well in contemporary superhero entertainment. Indeed, even more than Watchmen or V for Vendetta, it feels like Miracleman is the cornerstone of Simon Racioppa’s adaptation of Robert Kirkman’s Invincible. The third season of Invincible wrapped up this week. The seventh and eighth episodes of the season, “What Have I Done?” and “I Thought You’d Never Shut Up”, were especially brutal instalments of the series.

In “What Have I Done?”, the villainous Angstrom Levy (Sterling K. Brown) unleashes an army of doppelgänger versions of Mark Grayson (Steven Yeun) upon Earth. Although no individual member of the invasion task force is as strong as Mark, they are powerful enough to cause untold devastation tearing cities, heroes and people apart. Then in “I Thought You’d Never Shut Up”, the monstrous Viltrumite named Conquest (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) shows up in the wreckage to test Mark.

The scale of the devastation inflicted upon the planet over these two episodes is striking. “Los Angeles, Chicago and New York are almost completely levelled,” a news reporter (Gary Anthony Williams) announces. “Paris, Moscow, London, Tokyo, New Dehli, Seoul and Syndney have suffered similar damage. The death toll worldwide is already into the hundreds of thousands, with some analysts expecting it to triple in the coming days and weeks.”

To a certain extent, this is expected in a superhero adaptation. Undoubtedly informed and shaped by the imagery of 9/11, captured on camera and broadcast around the world, modern blockbuster cinema in general and superhero films in particular have become obsessed with urban devastation. The escalation of this grim spectacle was inevitable. However, Invincible stands out from the crowd with its willingness to depict the blood, gore and horror of this sort of carnage.

The action sequences are brutal and graphic. Characters are rent limb from limb. Skulls are caved in. Human beings burst like balloons. Buildings collapse, bones snap, blood splatters. At one point, in a macabre twist on the old boast about superheroes being “faster than a speeding bullet”, Conquest grabs Mark and ploughs him face-first through dozens of innocent bystanders, repeating a manoeuvre that Mark’s father Nolan (J.K. Simmons) employed in the first season finale.

While “What Have I Done?” and “I Thought You’d Never Shut Up” undoubtedly scale up the level of violence on display, Invincible has never been particularly squeamish. Earlier this season, duplicating superhero Multi-Paul (Simu Liu) staged a prison breakout by creating so many copies of himself that his prison cell blew open in a wave of flesh and bodily fluids. In the show’s very first episode, Nolan massacres the Guardians of the Globe in an incredibly bloody manner.

Some of the show’s atrocities begin to rhyme. Nolan’s attack on the Guardians of the Globe is mirrored in “What Have I Done?” when Mark’s counterpart tears through the team’s replacements. Levy’s arm is cut off by a portal in “What Have I Done?”, while Conquest shows up with a mechanical arm in “I Thought You’d Never Shut Up.” When Mark caves Conquest’s skull to mush in “I Thought You’d Never Shut Up”, it recalls how the Technicians found Levy in “What Have I Done?”

Speaking of recurring motifs within the show’s use of violence, Invincible has a tendency, which can be traced back to its very first scene, of introducing human characters conversing about their mundane lives, only to have those lives brutally and quickly (and often graphically) upended by some completely arbitrary superhero skirmish. Even as the show depicts alien invasions and urban devastation, it makes a point to emphasize the human beings whose lives are upended by this chaos.

The show leans very aggressively into its body horror. Kirkman writes many of the more graphic episodes himself, and acknowledges that he sees the show as an opportunity to push the envelope even further than he did in the comics. Describing Nolan’s murder of the Guardians in the very first episode, Kirkman boasted, “We took the scene as it existed in the comics, and I was able to pry the scene apart and add more stuff in the middle, which was a lot of fun.”

It was also Kirkman who made the choice to extend that sequence in which Nolan ploughs Mark through a train full of commuters at the end of the first season. “He wanted to expand upon that moment and just make it bigger, more brutal, more devastating, but emotionally to Mark and also to our audience,” explains Simon Racioppa. “He came up with the idea of holding Mark up to that train and forcing him to face Nolan's reality, which was that these people are meaningless.” Many of the seemingly mortal characters in Invincible - including Levy, Cecil Stedman (Walton Goggins) and Donald Ferguson (Chris Diamantopoulos) - have found themselves literally taken apart and put back together to survive this universe.

While this body horror can be read as a deconstruction of the logic underpinning the superhero genre – confronting the audience with how insignificant human life must appear to a being that powerful – it is also a more specific interrogation of the power fantasy. Invincible touches on the wider political and social implications of superheroes, but it fixates upon a more mundane and unsettling aspect of superheroism: violence at that scale and with that force is truly disgusting and horrifying. The human - and the superhuman body - literally deconstructed.

This is one reason that Invincible works so well in animation. As Amazon demonstrated with The Boys, it is possible to present gore and viscera in live action. Indeed, the scenes of Mark ploughing through human beings are just an escalation of the first true moment of viscera in The Boys. However, the animation style in Invincible, along with its superhero trappings and emphasis on body horror, evokes Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira. Although not usually classified as a superhero story, Akira exists in the same ambiguous space as something like Josh Trank’s Chronicle. It’s about the horror of a young man given impossible powers.

However, Invincible also recalls Moore’s work on Miracleman, a comic book series published by Marvel in the United Kingdom. Before Moore took over the book, Miracleman was a fairly generic riff on the Superman or Captain Marvel archetype, a boy with the power to turn himself into a superhero. However, Moore pushed the concept to its extreme, asking what it would mean for a human being to wield that sort of power and how it would affect their relationship with others.

This culminates in the legendary Miracleman #15, illustrated by John Totleben, in which the monstrous Kid Miracleman is unleashed and brings his terrible power to bear on London. The issue is horrifying, exploring what somebody with that much power could do to the human beings in a major populated urban center. Moore’s prose and Totleben’s art combine to create a vision of atrocity unlike anything that had been seen in a mainstream superhero comic to that point.

Of course, there are reasons why Miracleman was never as ubiquitous as Watchmen or V for Vendetta. Rights issues kept the comic book out of print for decades, which meant that the issues were very difficult to read. Even among a run that was difficult to read, Miracleman #15 was widely recognized as “the most difficult to find” of the set, and “commanded incredibly high prices in the back-issue market.”

The comic has since been reprinted and collected by Marvel, albeit in a censored form. As such, while Miracleman never had the same broader cultural cachet as some of Moore’s other superhero deconstructions, it was highly regarded among comic book aficionados. In particular, the level of violence and brutality on display within the comic, and the implied subversion of the superhero power fantasy in grotesque body horror, became a standard to be met and challenged.

Kieron Gillen, for example, described his superhero series Über as “Miracleman #15 stretched out over sixty issues.” Robert Kirkman seemingly spent years trying to match the shock and violence of Miracleman #15. An IGN review of Walking Dead #33 described it as “one of the most violent and gory issues of any comic book ever made”, specifically citing Miracleman #15. Invincible #110 also invited comparisons, with Chris Rice hearing “it compared to Miracleman #15 for sheer carnage.”

These comparisons may not be accidental. Without getting into spoilers, and knowing that the television series might go in a different direction, the ending of Kirkman’s run on Invincible owes a considerable amount to the conclusion of Moore’s work on Miracleman. It is the superhero power fantasy taken to its logical and perhaps inexorable conclusion. Kirkman gives Invincible “a proper ending”, but it is a very different ending than Watchmen or V for Vendetta.

Mainstream popular entertainment is dominated by superhero stories. Captain America: Brave New World was released last month. Daredevil: Born Again is currently releasing weekly on Disney+. Invincible is just one of Amazon’s two flagship superhero properties, alongside The Boys and discounting failed genre efforts like The Tick. Like the musical or the western, it is necessary to interrogate and deconstruct the genre so that it can remain fresh and interesting.

For decades, Watchmen has served as the gold standard of superhero deconstruction, to the point that this mode of interrogation has become almost as tired as the clichés that it seeks to take apart. Three seasons in, part of the charm of Invincible is that it’s found another angle through which it can challenge and explore the larger genre. Instead of picking at the “big picture” aspects of the superhero fantasy, it instead explores the most basic and most visceral logic underpinning it.

Invincible does this by harking back to one of the earliest and one of the lesser-known deconstructions of the genre. It’s a minor miracle.