Though I raved the first half of season 2, I think most Invincible fans are in agreement that the second half stumbled towards the end. It took its time building up to a climactic battle that ends too soon, with the rest of the finale episode petering out as it focuses more on setting up season 2 than resolving the emotional aftermath of season 2’s climax. Even then, the highs of season 2 never quite reach the same heights as season 1.

 

That all said, though the first episode of season 3 is a lukewarm start, the second and third episodes can be boiled down to two points. In terms of writing, we are so back. In terms of visuals, we’re still stuck in the same spot.

 

The animation of Invincible is, to my speculation, due to limited resources. Invincible’s production cost is reportedly around a quarter of The Boys’s, The Boys regularly given ~$10M per episode, which allegedly gives Invincible around $2.5M. To compare it to another Amazon animated show from the same animation studio, The Legend of Vox Machina costs $750k per 22-minute episode. Writing as an indie film producer, a rule of thumb for budgeting is that when you double the length of a project, you need to quadruple the budget. For a story to sustain itself to double the length, it requires more settings, more characters, and more time to write/edit, more than double the workload for sure. Given that quadruple budget breathing room, Invincible should be operating with at least $3M per episode. This is still a conservative number since Vox Machina suffers similar restraints as Invincible but, with more comedic elements, it has more opportunities to hide the lack of resources.

 

Visuals aside, the writing of season 3 is what I was hoping for, justifying some of the issues I had with season 2. It might be best to thing of seasons 2 and 3 and two halves of the same season, where season 2 is all setup and season 3 is all pay off. Of course, I had the luxury of reading the comic long before the show’s premiere, so I knew what was coming up, but the show takes more of a remix approach in terms of adaptation: The main story is the same, but events are swapped around to fit the pacing of TV better. After all, the comic is written similarly to a manga: there are loose definitions of arcs, but it’s mostly a continuous story that’s all gas and no brakes. With TV, since it’s not releasing regularly year-round, there has to be some brakes.

 

Season 3 leans heavier into the subtext the show has been trying to add to the source material since the beginning: The deeper effects of Mark’s relationship to his father, the complications of having a younger sibling that has a very different view of your parents, the moral pressures of responsibility, and seeking acceptance. Of course blend in some fun superhero action sequences, complete with the blood and gore Invincible fans know and love, and the moral ambiguity of Mark’s boss, Cecil, these first three episodes pack a lot of punch as things slowly take a darker turn.

 

But, in order to keep this spoiler-free, that’s enough out of me. I’ll return with a spoiler-full review after the season finale airs!