Invincible is the best comic book show on television right now - here's why

No shade intended to Daredevil, The Boys and the rest, of course.

Robert Kirkman’s run is almost generational when it comes to the comic-to-TV pipeline of hits. First The Walking Dead and the entire franchise ecosystem it spawned, then the cult horror hit Outcast, and now Amazon Prime’s hit adult animated series Invincible.

And it’s even wilder when you remember all those are originals — meaning they’re not based on former IP, just stuff he cooked up on the comic page that eventually made the jump to live action/animation. Though Kirkman’s will probably always be best known for The Walking Dead, it’s Invincible where he scratched his comic book superhero itch.

With Invincible, Kirkman skipped over trying to tell a story through the Marvel/DC framework and just created a full-on superhero universe all his own (with plenty of winks, nods and homages to Marvel and DC along the way, of course). His Invincible series ran a full 15 years from 2003-2018, spanning 144 issues with a bevy of cool spinoffs mixed in.

The entire Invincible comic run is well worth a read. It’s a huge, sci-fi superhero saga hitting everything from tight-knit family drama to universe-shaking stakes featuring an alien war, universe-hopping and so much more. It takes all the fun tropes and concepts fans will recognize from other comics and universes, and puts them through an incredibly smart, compelling, original lens to create something new.

Invincible is the best because it has no limits (thank you, animation)

When word broke that Amazon Prime was developing the comic as a bloody, gory, R-rated animated series, I was skeptical. Thankfully, they knew just how over-the-top they had to go to make this work — and they even tossed in a ton of great, celebrity voice work to get it there.

It’s that choice to take the project the animated route that proved to be the adaptation’s saving grace. This story is just… massive. Kirkman’s wrote it as big as he could conceivably imagine, because in the comics, there were no limits. Battles that rip planets to shreds; alien armies; anything he could imagine he just put on the page.

An animated show offers that same type of freedom, and it’s the only way you could imagine this series being told at the right scope. It’s simply too big for live action, unless a studio wanted to drop a few Avengers-level Marvel budgets on it — and even then, there’s just too much to condense into a 2-3 hour story.

Invincible is a generational saga, and animation gives is that freedom to spread out and be told.

And it’s that scope and scale that makes it the best comic book show on TV right now — with no shade intended to Daredevil: Born Again or The Boys, both of which are among my favorite shows of the year. But those shows, as great as they are, are something different. The Boys is a brilliant subversion and deconstruction of the superhero s, while Daredevil is a street-level story like the best of small-scale Marvel.

But Invincible? It’s just huge. It’s the gigantic crossover event comics we read growing up brought to life, and brought to life earnestly with a winking respect and reverence for the medium and style of storytelling in itself. You can feel the love for superhero storytelling in every frame of the series, in every little wink and joke, in every cute fake out. It’s the show we never knew we wanted, but always needed.

Kirkman has said in the past he’d like 7-9 seasons to fully tell the complete comic saga (for those keeping count, they’re in the middle of Season 4 right now). It’s a story so big it has to be told in this type of episodic format.

Here’s hoping it goes on forever.