‘Invincible’ Creator Robert Kirkman Is Finally Bringing His Adult, Animated Series to Life

Way back in 2003 a relatively new comic writer named Robert Kirkman introduced the world to Invincible, a superhero series he co-created with artist Cory Walker for Image Comics. By the twelfth issue, the story of new hero Mark Grayson and his father Omni-Man was a hit, though Kirkman would go on to launch an even bigger success by the end of 2003: The Walking Dead.

A little less than two decades later, Invincible is finally following in Kirkman’s zombie hit’s footsteps, and coming to TV (an earlier version of Invincible was released as a “motion comic” and later broadcast on MTV2) as a new, hour-long adult animated series on Amazon’s Prime Video. Starring newly minted Oscar nominee Steven Yeun as Invincible, J.K. Simmons as Omni-Man, and Sandra Oh as Invincible’s mother (and Omni-Man’s wife), the cast of the series is stacked — and as fans of the comics know very well, this blood-soaked adaptation is no Saturday morning cartoon. Thanks to surprising twists and turns that happen in the first episode alone, it’s clear Kirkman and company aren’t holding back on the “adult” part of “adult animated series.”

“There are hour long superhero dramas that are live action, and there are half hour animated shows,” Kirkman told Decider about the adaptation. “We wanted to marry the two. I wanted this to stand apart.”

We talked to Kirkman about adapting his own work, diversifying the cast for the animated series, where it’s all going next — and beware spoilers if you haven’t watched the first three episodes yet (episodes will debut one a week after this).

Decider: I always like to open up the hardest hitting question right off the bat. So: why change Science Dog to Séance Dog?

Robert Kirkman: [Laughs] Yeah, look. I think that the nuts and bolts answer… I’m trying to come up with something creative and fun, but the nuts and bolts answers is that Science Dog is a separate comic book that Cory Walker and I created that just happened to appear [in Invincible]. It’s possible that we may do a movie or TV show or something at some point. Instead of putting that down in our deal with Amazon, on Invincible, we decided to strip it out and put in something new so that we would have the ability to do that.

…I need to come up with a more creative answer for that! There may be a separate Science Dog series at some point, and we had a lot of fun with Séance Dog. So expect more Séance Dog as we move forward.

Excellent. Let’s broaden it out quite a bit… The character of Invincible is almost 20 years old. What was it like revisiting that origin story, and tweaking it for the TV format?

Honestly, it was one of the most fun things I’ve done writing wise, writing that pilot, just because it was a very, very, very long time ago that I wrote that first issue of the comic. I certainly, I hope, have grown and changed over time, and gotten a little bit better at what I’m doing, having done it for much longer. And so to be able to look at that story and go, “Okay, well, I can expand this and tweak this and add certain things to it,” was really a lot of fun. It’s kind of like getting to go back and do a second draft of the comic book series, which is really exciting.

Another thing is, Invincible ended right as I started working on the animated series, so it was a matter of weeks or months between writing the last issue of the comic and writing the first episode of the animated series. So I was able to keep my relationship with these characters intact. Even though I ended the comic book series, I never really had a period where I missed them. I love these characters. I wanted to end the comic book series, because that was a natural end, but I knew I was gonna [leave] these characters and now I don’t have to do that. So this is really a lot of great fun for me.

It’s interesting to hear you say that… I revisited the first 13 issues recently, and they’re much more sparsely plotted and jokier in terms of the storytelling than where you ended up, which is denser and a little more serious. Do you feel like revisiting it, knowing that journey went on over the course of 100 plus issues, the TV show ended up splitting the difference between the two tones?

[I ended up] pulling some of the stuff that’s in the later issues of the comic book series and injecting them into the opening scenes a little bit more to make things a little bit more cohesive I think. But also, it’s fun to keep that evolution intact. So we definitely wanted to start the animated series in that way, where it’s a superhero story, and we’re gonna have a lot of fun here, and we use some fun characters to do fun things… And then set things up so that we can pull the rug out from under people. Just having that roadmap laid out and being able to sit with our creative team, to [allow] a head writer to pick and choose. We’ll make this storyline longer, make this storyline shorter, we know that this is issue 60 and so we can say a line of dialogue [from there]. But when you watch the series over again, it’ll be like, “Oh, man, like, he came in saying it this way. But now he says it this way.” You can see that evolution is much more clear, because we have that roadmap laid out. We’re able to follow it a little bit more closely than I did in the comic book series when I was making things up as I went along.

Why an hour long adult animated series? It’s not the typical episode structure people would have expected.

There are hour long superhero dramas that are live action, and there are half hour animated shows. We wanted to marry the two. I wanted this to stand apart. I wanted this to have crazy scope and scale that you can’t really get in a live action superhero show. I wanted to have this really dramatic core that allows you to have lengthy, dramatic and emotional scenes between the characters, to really let these actors do their thing and make you fall in love with the characters, but you don’t really have the time for it in a half hour animated thing. So we wanted to marry the two worlds there. This is a high octane superhero story. But if you don’t have the emotion of knowing these characters, and knowing what makes them tick, the action sequences aren’t gonna have the right emotional punch. So this format, while it is somewhat unique, I think works really well with this kind of story.

I don’t know how much you necessarily can speak to this, but how instrumental if at all, was the success of The Boys in selling the show to Amazon?

Internally, I don’t know. I mean, The Boys had not launched yet when this got greenlit. So the success of The Boys wasn’t the only reason this got picked up. But I think that they knew they had something special in The Boys from the get go. Internally, I can’t help but think that Amazon had to be like, The Boys is going to work and maybe Invincible will work too, let’s give it a shot. So I’m very appreciative Garth [Ennis] and Darick [Robertson] were able to create the comics. Everybody’s been able to accomplish so much with the show, I think it really paved the way for what we’re going to be able to do with Invincible.

Cory Walker and Ryan Ottley are super instrumental to the comic, through their look, through their layouts… How much input did they have on the show, if anything, and how important was it to channel the look of their art in the animation of the series?

Their hands are all over the show and we wouldn’t have been able to do this thing without them. I mean, Ryan and Cory are both supervising producers, that are looking at things and improving things. But more than that, Cory Walker is literally [lead character designer], and every character that you see has his influence and his eye. That’s one of the things that makes this show look so unique, that makes the show look so cool, is that you have this guy that has this intimate knowledge of these characters, who has worked on them for years and years, bringing all of that knowledge and expertise to the show. So there’s a level of authenticity to the show that is just not present in other adaptations, because the chief visual designer that created the world and created the comics with me working on this show day in and day out to make it what it is. I think it’s really special.

I did want to talk about the casting for the show, because it’s so insanely stacked across the board. There are a lot of Walking Dead alums, which tracks, but sid it start with, say, Steven Yeun and that was the domino from there?

It was Steven, he and I are buddies. Working with him on Walking Dead and seeing what he was able to do with the character Glenn showed me that he can grow and change and evolve for the character in a really competitive way. Invincible is a character that changes and evolves more than any character I’ve ever written. I knew I needed somebody who could pull that off. Once Steven was on board, everybody wants to work with Steven Yeun. He was really the magnet [that] allowed us to assemble this amazing team. And once you’ve got J.K. Simmons and Sandra Oh, it’s like, “oh, I want to be a part of this project.” Then it was very easy.

There was a lot of work ,and we worked very closely with Linda Lamontagne, our casting director, to bring in the best of the best. Every day, I was like, “wait, what Mahershala Ali for Titan, is this really happening? Like, really? Gillian Jacobs?” It was the most exciting time assembling this cast, knowing that I was going to get to work with these people, I was going to get to use Zachary Quinto for the Robot dialogue, it was just absolutely crazy. It’s just so fun seeing it all come together.

I appreciated watching the show that it was more inclusive than it was with the cast in the comic. Was that something that the team set out to do from the get go? Or did that come with the casting, and then lead to the diversity of the animation?

It was from the get go. We were designing the characters and changing ethnicities. We were trying to come up with a more well rounded and more diverse world that better represented the world around us. That’s something that’s very important to me. I think the comic book was fairly diverse for its time. But I can’t help but acknowledge that it was created by two white guys in their early 20s. In the early part of it, that was central. So it definitely could have been more diverse. There’s a tendency for things to skew male in superhero comics, especially back then.

So you’re able to gender swap a couple of characters and definitely give Debbie, played by Sandra Oh, a much larger role in the series, which I think is really good. That was baked in from the get go. We actually cast based on the ethnicities that we had set up for the characters, because we didn’t want to have any cross race casting. Amber was designed and decided to be Black and then [we] cast Zazie Beetz, which is really cool. I can’t help but acknowledge that she was definitely a visual influence on how that character was designed, but the character wasn’t [initially] designed after she was cast.

This is getting into spoilers here, and if you know the first 13 issues of the comic you know where this series is going… But it feels more blatant with Omni-Man being suspicious; we certainly get to see him be a lot more violent in those first couple of episodes than in the comic, killing the Guardians of the Globe at the end of Episode 1. What led to those changes in particular?

I had taken my time a little bit too much. The famous story was that the Omni-Man turn wasn’t originally planned to happen until issue #25 and Jim Valentino, the Publisher of Image Comics at the time was like, “there’s not gonna be an issue 25 if you wait until then.” So I was able to move it up to issue #7, and it really didn’t take off until #11, or #12.

But now moving into the animated series, that looked like that wasn’t enough. That’s the thing people say about the Invincible comics: “oh, man, you gotta hang on to volume 3, volume 3 is when it really kicks off.” We knew that we couldn’t afford to do that on the show and we had to move things up. The actual premise of what the show actually has to be present in the first episode, we couldn’t do multiple episodes to trick you into thinking that it was one thing and then show you that it was something else. We’ll do that all in the span of one episode in the animated series. So that’s another thing [with] the benefit of hindsight, having come up with the series and going, “ok this worked, but I think we can make it work better if we do it this way.”

I know this is very early going to ask this, but you have 144 issues of the comic… Do you feel like that is the full blueprint for, potentially, the multi-season plan for the show? Or do you think a little veer off in different directions from the book?

I think that’s the blueprint. I think that we’re definitely going to do some new things along the way, and I have some ideas for different storylines from the comic that I wanted to do, but never got around to doing. I would love to try to work into this show. So there’s definitely going to be some new and crazy different things that pop in, but the rough skeleton of what it is that we want to do is the comic book series. Is the end point of the comic book series going to be the exact ending that we have in the animated show? I don’t know. That’s many years away for us, so who knows. But the idea right now is to try to adapt what we did in the comic books in animated form and follow that story along fairly closely.

If the show is successful, are you planning on spinning it off into Fear The Invincible and Invincible: World Beyond?

[Laughs] Those are good titles, I like the sound of that. I think that Invincible represents a wider and larger superhero world. There’s a lot of potential for different spin-offs and different companion series. In comic book form, we had books like Tech Jacket, and Brit and The Astounding Wolf-Man that were separate stories in the same universe. If it’s a massive success, I would love to try and expand the world out and have a shared universe of superhero stories in animated form. That would be a lot of fun. But who knows what the future holds. I know that there’s a lot of story to be told within the Invincible series itself, and we’re focused mostly on just being able to tell that story right now.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Where to watch Invincible