As of today the second season of Invincible is complete, so if that’s what you’ve been waiting for, you can load up Amazon Prime and binge the whole thing. After that, come back here for some analysis on the surprises worked into the season finale. This is your warning that there are spoilers ahead.
The entire first half of Season 2, Episode 8 was taken up by one long battle between Mark Grayson and the bulbous-headed supervillain Angstrom Levy. It was pretty much a one-sided fight for the majority of that time, with Invincible getting tossed around like a rag doll because he didn’t want to unleash his full strength against Levy, fearing he’d kill the guy. Levy’s superpower involved opening portals to other dimensions, which is where Invincible ended up spending a lot of time.
In two of these dimensions he meets Spider-Man and Batman. Or rather, “Agent Spider” and an unnamed person who is dressed like a bat. Robert Kirkman, creator of Invincible and some other comic about zombies, told IGN the former is a direct reference to an actual comic book, Marvel Team-Up #14, where Invincible guest-starred and met Spider-Man. Fitting a scene from that event into the animated series, without the clearance to put Spidey in it, meant getting creative.
It is obvious who Agent Spider is patterned after. He sticks to walls, has web shooters, and is fighting a mad scientist with mechanical limbs. To cut things even closer his voice actor is Josh Keaton, who played Peter Parker in The Spectacular Spider-Man animated series. Kirkman says Amazon’s legal department was watching the scene very closely, suggesting alternate colors and designs to get it as close as possible without crossing a legal line.
Then there’s Batman, whom they didn’t even try to sneak in a parody of. He’s almost entirely off-camera and doesn’t speak, but Mark’s dialogue fills in everything: “You’re a MAN, who dresses like a BAT, and your name is…i mean like, don’t you think that’s kinda lazy?”
Kirkman’s defense? “That’s not Gotham City. That’s not Batman. That’s a completely different bat character that Mark is referring to. If the audience is inferring a certain thing from it, I don’t have control over that. The audience gets to take from it what they will, but it was never our intention to imply anything remotely close to the Batman character.” Uh-huh, suuuure. We getcha. Wink.
The first two seasons of Invincible, plus the special Atom Eve, are streamable on Amazon Prime Video. No one knows when Season 3 will happen, but hopefully it’ll be within the next fifty years.
