A couple of months ago I watched Invincible on Amazon Prime Video. It's an adaptation of the comic by Robert Kirkman of Walking Dead fame. Amazon Prime had the first three volumes of the comics, or issues 1-13, for free through Prime Reading so I checked them out and finally got around to reading them last month.
And as the title says, it turns out that the TV show is better. The TV show and comics have a lot of the same elements, but the storytelling in the TV show is a lot more focused and paced better.
One of the major differences is the murder of the Justice League-type team in the TV show takes place at the end of the first episode. In the comics it doesn't happen until about issue #7. It's actually a lot better more towards the beginning because that gives more time to turn it into a mystery. In the comics the Guardians of the Globe are killed by Mark's superhero father and 2-3 issues later he confesses everything. The demon detective investigating the case doesn't find anything and Mark's mom doesn't get suspicious of anything either.
It's a lot better in the TV show where it's more drawn out. Even though we know Mark's father did it, it's better wondering if the other characters will figure it out versus it just being solved almost right away.
Quite a few other things were just glossed over in the comics that were explored more in the TV show. The most prominent is Mark has a crush on a girl at school named Amber. He starts going out with her and has to juggle being with her and school and being a superhero. In the comics we see her passing him a note to call her and then it's just mentioned in dialogue that they're going out. But we never actually see them interacting at all.
In the TV show Mark, Amber, and William go to Upstate College and are attacked by robo-zombies. In the comics it's just Mark and William and William spends more time bitching about people not wanting to call him by his full first name than they spend being accosted by robo-zombies. There's a brief fight and then the robo-zombie vanishes; we never find out who built them or why. In one episode of the TV show Mark and the "Teen Team" (their version of the Teen Titans) fight an alien invasion. The aliens come from another universe where time runs differently so the first time they end up dying of old age after a short time. In the TV show they come back a couple more times, each time having developed better weapons. In the comics there's just one battle and it's Mark and his dad. In both his dad winds up going through a portal to the alien dimension. In the comics he comes back later and says he led a revolt and a couple of scientists helped him get home. In the TV show he brutally slaughters pretty much their entire world, demonstrating that the murder of the Guardians of the Globe was not an isolated event.
The battle between Mark and his father is more drawn out in the TV show. Before they fight, the government sics conventional weapons, nukes, robo-zombies, and a kaiju on Mark's father. In the comics it's just Mark and his dad. There's more of an emotional moment in the TV show when Mark's father thinks back to cheering his son in Little League and then disappears. In the comics he just stops and disappears.
There are a lot of subplots in the TV show that weren't in the first three volumes of comics. They might have come up later--or not. I'm not sure and don't feel like spending a bunch of money to find out. For instance in one episode Mark helps a villain take down a gangster, only for the villain to take over the gangster's rackets. Over the course of a few episodes, Robot, the leader of the Teen Team, develops an attraction to Monster Girl, a young girl who turns into a Hulk-type creature, though when she does she gets 1 week younger. Robot blackmails a couple of alien clones into making a human body for him so he and Monster Girl can be together. None of that has happened--yet. Over a few episodes Atom Eve, a member of the Teen Team who also goes to school with Mark, leaves the team when she finds her boyfriend cheating on her with another member of the team. Then she goes off on her own to help people on her own terms. In the comics she catches her boyfriend cheating but the rest of the stuff doesn't happen--at least not yet. In one episode Mark goes to Mars with a space shuttle flight and inadvertently unleashes an apocalypse there. But that hasn't happened yet in the comics either.
The TV show also does better with representation. In the comics Mark and his mom are Asian but other than that there aren't any other minority main characters. Female characters are portrayed a little better in the TV show. As I said, Mark's girlfriend Amber is barely shown in the comics while in the TV show she's a main character--and black instead of white. In the TV show his mom is a realtor while in the comics she's just a housewife sitting around all day waiting for her husband and son to come home from saving the world. I'm not sure either version passes the Bechdel test but the TV show is much closer. In the TV show Mark's friend William is gay, which becomes especially clear when they go to the college and he's going out with some dude there. Such does not appear to be the case in the comics and there are no other gay characters. When Mark takes William up into the air he even says, "This is so gay," using it as a slur.
So in the end I think the first season of the TV show was a lot better. The pacing was better and there was a lot more depth than in the comics. From reading some of the notes in the comics, part of it might have been that they weren't really sure if the comic book would be able to get much past 12 issues. Besides sales the original artist who worked on it got busy and they had to change. With the TV show they already had an order for 8 45-minute-ish episodes so there wasn't as much pressure to rush things along, allowing them to develop characters and situations more.
Anyway, it's definitely better on TV and for most people I suppose that would be easier too. It's a win-win!
1 comment:
It makes sense that a TV show would have a lot of advantage over a comic book.
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