So I was reading a lot of the violence as metacommentary on superhero comics and the realities of, say, what happens when you have ridiculous super-strength and fight people all the time (because people inflicting violence on each other is/should be horrifying, and doing it with super-violence will rightly be super-horrifying, not sanitized and fun). And there is definitely a little bit of conscious highlight of this when Mark first goes to stop the alien invasion and isn't prepared for seeing people blown apart by heavy weaponry at mass scale ("I just thought I'd punch them for a while and they'd go home!"). But besides that scene (and maybe a bit of the Immortal-vs-Omniman fight in the second-last episode), it kinda seems like they just miss the point and often lean into horrific gore for its own sake, undercutting their own premise - it just loops all the way back around and turns back into a big celebration of violence, just way worse violence than before. As I understand things, it also lands a bit differently now, when a lot more mainstream comics have embraced the whole shocking-horrific-violence-and-gore trope than they had in, what, 2003? This robs Invincible's violence of even more impact, so now it's more like just "a superhero thing but really violent." Ah well?
I did like the story overall, and I'm interested in the next seasons. But I might be more interested in going back to read the comic itself and see if it lands much differently, too.
I did like the story overall, and I'm interested in the next seasons. But I might be more interested in going back to read the comic itself and see if it lands much differently, too.