Invincible Volume 10, Kirkman and Ottley, Image Comics
This is a difficult volume to review. Unlike the previous ones where there’s either one MAIN story line and lots of subplots, or loads of different plots climaxing at once, here there’s more of string of climaxes. One plot ends and then another one ends and then another one…
That’s not a criticism. Kirkman wasn’t writing for the trades, he was writing for the issues. It is a problem with reviewing something that’s meant to be consumed differently from how I’m consuming it though, but I’ll summarise as well as I can.
Mark quits his work for Cecil because Cecil is a big murder condoning government man which leads to Mark fighting the Reanimen which leads to the Guardians splitting up. And straight after that but unrelated to it we’ve got Multi-Paul getting broken out of prison, leading to other bad guys escaping, which collides with Oliver getting trained to be a superhero by Mark when he ends up ‘accidentally’ killing them. In the middle of all the present day stuff there’s also a flashback mini-story about Cecil and how he became so ruthless. Meanwhile Eve and Mark finally get properly together.
Plot done! Let’s look at the characters, because there is stuff going on.
Eve, Eve, my god. We see her in Africa again. This time there’s no soaring angel of white saviourdom: she’s just handing out food to some silent African village stereotypes.
Invincible Volume 10, Kirkman and Ottley, Image Comics
Then, just to make it even better, we hear that she’s moving home because:
Invincible Volume 10, Kirkman and Ottley, Image Comics
This could have been played as her realising that her ‘solution’ was basically making the people she was helping completely dependent on her rather than giving them the chance to develop their own sustainable societies. If Kirkman felt like treating Africa respectfully he could even have mentioned that maybe there are political and economic reasons behind their poverty, that maybe she realised that she can fight her cause better in the West anyway since that’s where the issues are coming from.
Nope. She moved home for Mark. But she’s not ‘giving up’ on Africa so hooray.
With Cecil’s shady government man stuff coming to the forefront, he gets some development too. He used to be all ‘right and wrong are black and white’ but now he’s not! Because he went to prison? Yeah. We don’t really get the reasons why he becomes who he is now, just a series of snap shots into when it happened. Like we see him put his foot down on working with criminals by killing two who were in the government’s employ, and then we see him in prison being offered the job he has now, and then we see him making deals with criminals himself. There’s no sense that he saw the benefits to being more morally changeable.
But missed character beats are sort of the theme of this issue, especially with our star.
Mark has changed.
Back in the early volumes, while he wasn’t exactly kill happy, he was still okay with butchering an entire army worth of alien bug people, or making a quip right after throwing a bad guy to his explosion-y end. Now, well:
Invincible Volume 10, Kirkman and Ottley, Image Comics
Let me be clear: I like this characterisation more than I liked him before. To me, it is wrong to execute someone even after due process, so I‘m not going to support a lone vigilante making the decision to end lives. But something about it doesn’t sit right. Mark’s earlier eagerness to murder read as what was supposed to be pragmatism- he believed that killing was the only way to stop some threats permanently. Coming from a character created by a long time comic writer working outside the big two after some years writing for them, that felt like a deliberate statement; an ‘my super hero is more grown up and practical than the ones you guys have’ sort of egotism that was bitter at best and childish at worst.
Now we have Mark changing his mind and stating that killing is wrong for superheroes. Sure he adds in some extra justifications, that Darkwing was killing ‘because he enjoyed it’ (which was obviously untrue) and that made it wrong, that Oliver is being too violent and that makes it wrong, but his gut reaction is the same: killing is bad. Which, again, is a good development. It could be read as Mark coming into his own as an adult, or consciously stepping away from his father’s bloodthirsty people, or even a natural reaction to any young person seeing such a lot of death.
Except there has been nothing in his behaviour to foreshadow this.
Killing was okay. Then it wasn’t mentioned. Then it wasn’t okay. One of the problems with there being no internal monologues in Invincible is that we don’t get to see Mark’s thought process, but Ottley’s a good enough artist to develop most of his important character beats without one. This ‘no killing’ thing hasn’t been there. At all.
So really what’s happened here is, to me, anyway, that Kirkman has rethought how he feels about superheroes killing. Recently Mark Miller said that his books like Kick-Ass came out of the culture in comics at the time, that today his less bitter tone is the same thing- inspired by what’s happening around him in the industry. Basically, that we’re in a happier place and so, so are his books. I think something similar happened with Kirkman.
Again, it’s a good thing.
More cynically you could look at it as a deliberate attempt to sweep the early issues under the rug to make more drama now (Mark’s killing of Angstom Levy is played up way more than it should be given how comfortable everyone was with him murdering before) but I’m an optimist. Or maybe that’s just the culture talking.
Invincible Volume 10: Who’s the Boss? is available from comixology.
