“Steven and I have a rule that there’s no more popping his eyeballs out. I can live with that – once is enough,” Kirkman tells Den of Geek and other outlets during the series’ press day. Kirkman’s imagination is as violent as it is vast. Yeun’s character Glenn Rhee on AMC’s The Walking Dead (based on the Kirkman comic of the same name) was a notable unfortunate recipient of that bloodlust when he was beaten to death with a barbed wire baseball bat in the show’s seventh season. The appeal of Invincible can be hard to describe. At first glance, it’s a very conventional comic book story. Mark is the son of Nolan Grayson a.k.a. Omni-Man, an alien from the planet Viltrum and now Earth’s most powerful superhero (of which there are many). The series begins with Mark eagerly anticipating the arrival of his own superpowers and then embarking on an adventure of super self discovery, alongside a host of heroic allies and terrifying villains. What sets Invincible apart, however, is its dedication to realistic storytelling. Mark is a very likeable, yet believably flawed young man.Kirkman’s sprawling 144-issue narrative meticulously follows Mark’s maturation and the ethical questions raised by a universe fit-to-bursting with invulnerable ubermensches. There’s also the violence…oh the sweet, sweet violence. Ryan Ottley’s art in Invincible has a deep, abiding respect for the physics of super powers. Though the images may be colorful, the action depicted within them are shocking in their brutality. Nary does a bone go uncrunched or an intestine un-ripped out in Kirkman and Ottley’s hyper visceral world. Naturally, Invincible was always a hot target for adaptation, particularly after AMC hit Kirkman zombie paydirt with The Walking Dead. But how exactly could any TV series fully capture the deliriously gory detail of Ottley’s art? The answer as it turns out is to just go ahead and adapt the art too. While heightening the violent rhythms of Invincible seems like a wild proposition, the show’s star agrees that the animation does just that. “You can go to places that live-action probably isn’t able to go to, even now,” Yeun tells Den of Geek and other outlets. “(Animation) creates a nice separation so that you can examine what the show might be saying without one-to-one comparison. Like that’s an actual arm being ripped off, but it’s a cartoon arm being ripped off. There’s just something different about that.” Both Yeun and J.K. Simmons, who plays Nolan, note that the show’s kinetic sequences provide interesting voice acting challenges. “What’s really fun is going back over in ADR and tracing back over these action sequences and these emotional moments. A lot of this show lives in those emotional moments that aren’t necessarily mixed in with dialogue, where a breath or a subtle way of gurgling blood in your mouth and trying to breath is its own kind of emotionality,” Yeun says. “ADR is usually just ‘make this grunt.’ But because of the intensity of the violence and the stakes and the repercussions, it did feel much more emotionally connected doing the fight sequences,” Simmons adds. According to Kirkman, animation was the only way to properly tell this story. “The main benefit is that we’re going to be able to provide the audience with a scope and scale, more akin to a $200 million blockbuster movie than what you usually get from your average superhero television show,” Kirkman says. “Drawing an army of a thousand people is a little bit easier than hiring a thousand people and putting costumes on them and things like that. If we want to have three different alien invasions in the same episode, we can.” Kirkman knows the limits of live-action television as well as anyone. Though The Walking Dead remains an enormous success for AMC, it has experienced quite a bit of casting turnover throughout the years with only Norman Reedus’s Daryl Dixon and Melissa McBride’s Carol Peletier remaining of the season 1 main cast in the show’s 11 seasons. Requesting that actors endure grueling television shooting schedules in the humid Atlanta summers for an undetermined number of years is a big ask as it turns out. If depicted in live-action, the commitments of actors’ times and bodies would be even more brutal for the Invincible cast. And the cast of Invincible is set to be huge. The first season alone will star: Yeun as Mark Grayson, Simmons as Nolan Grayson, Sandra Oh as Debbie Grayson, Seth Rogen as Allen the Alien, Gillian Jacobs as Atom Eve, Andrew Rannells as William Clockwell, Zazie Beetz as Amber Bennett, Walton Goggins as Cecil Stedman, Jason Mantzoukas as Rex Splode, Zachary Quinto as Robot, and many, many more. (Check out the full list over here). And that’s before the story begins to expand with more heroes and villains in later issues/seasons. The relatively smaller time commitments of voiceover acting in animation allows Kirkman and the series writers to keep the cast as large as needed, though Simmons notes that he, Yeun, and Oh all still get to act together in-studio. “These are characters that I should know intimately, but getting to work with these actors and getting to hear these voices and how these performances come together, it’s like I’m meeting these characters again for the first time and the absolute best way,” Kirkman says. “I’m seeing new aspects to them that didn’t really exist before. It’s really making me more excited about moving forward with this show for many seasons with this cast.”
